What Happens Your Current Processor Bails?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Whilst this is perhaps one of the hardest challenges that a webmaster of a paysite can face in the industry it isn’t as bad as they may seem at first after all, there are literally hundreds of processors to choose from ranging from credit card processors, dialer option, micro-sms billing and a wide range of other systems.

The first and foremost thing you should do however when confronted with this challenge is to try and contact your existing processor and find out what will happen to funds that you are owed, will you be paid (in most cases you will).

The next thing you should do is to evaluate your business billing methods are you offering multiple processors already? If so, simply switch to your backup processor and find a new processor to use as a backup.

However, what happens if you only have a single processor on your site what can you do then?

First things first, you need to make sure you choose a reliable payment processor to start off with companies such as iBill, CCBill, CCBill EU, Netbilling and Jettis are all good processors used by a multitude of sponsors and content providers amongst the other companies.

You will most likely find that these companies are more than happy to work with you in the integration of their system onto your site.

Whilst you are awaiting your setup of your new processor to ensure you do not lose any sales it may be an idea to divert your join page off to a dialer or, perhaps have some form of ‘internal’ billing mechanism set up so that, when you do change over processors you can seamlessly transition your member base across.

Now, presuming that you already have an existing member base what do you do then? How easy or hard is it going to be to transfer them across to your new processor? Well based on the situation some were confronted with when Visa introduced the new fees to process adult payments this can vary from webmaster to webmaster again, as before, the easiest solution for you would be to contact the company you will be using as your primary processor and see what they can suggest.

Hopefully, you will have access to a database of your existing members email addresses this will also come in handy to ensure you can keep recurring those members. Send out an email stating that you will be changing your processor and, ask that, if they would like to remain a member of your site that they update their billing information, it might also be prudent to offer them some sort of recompense for having them change processors perhaps something along the lines of 2 weeks low cost or even free access tot he site, this is sure to mean that most of, if not all of your existing members will input their billing information again enabling you to rebill them until they cancel their membership at our new processor.

Of course nothing is infallible so the best advice i can offer you is to work closely with your new found processor and make sure that the transition period happens as quickly and, as smoothly as possible.

Hopefully this article will be of some use to those who do get affected by their processors going out of business and, will also serve as a warning to have multiple processors in place for those who have not or will not have the need to change your billing company.

Article written by Lee

Masters Of Discipline – Have You Got What It Takes?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

So you want to throw in your day job and become a full time adult Webmaster? Well yeah, I can hear you saying, “Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by pictures of beautiful women all day, make up their own hours, and be the master of their own destiny?” It just sounds sooo good when it’s put like that doesn’t it?

Before you tell your boss you quit, you might want to read this article first, as the reality of working in this industry and especially for yourself can be a real wake up call for many.

The main thing you need to succeed in this business is discipline, and lots of it. If there are temptations when you work for someone else to slack off, take a sick day, or simply not bother showing up, then you can double those temptations when you work for yourself.

It’s so easy to roll over in the morning rather than get out of bed, stagger to the PC, and actually work.

It’s so easy to decide to take the day off when the sun is shining and the beach is calling. You simply tell yourself you’ll make up for it tonight, and then find yourself coming home at 3am.

It’s so easy to not actually work, when you work for yourself, that at times it can be unreal.

The reality of doing any of the above is longer nights, less sleep, and almost inevitably smaller paychecks.

Structure Your Day.

The answer to this problem is to really think about your working day and give it some structure, just as you would if you worked for someone else. Work set hours and take frequent breaks. When you work for someone else they make you take breaks for a variety of reasons, but mostly, because as research has proved, you’ll be more productive after one. It’s also important to make sure others know your hours as well, and always remember to add what time zone you are located in on any correspondence. There is nothing worse than being awoken by an associate at 3am because you forgot that little detail!

Set A Routine.

Get into a routine! There are various tasks that must be done each week no mater how boring. By creating a work routine, you can control your time and structure the more boring jobs at the end of the day when for most our creativity levels are less. You can also structure that routine as I do, when I’ve finished those boring tasks at the end of each day, I reward myself with some time doing what I want to do.

Going Solo.

This can be a lonely business and if you don’t like working alone then maybe it’s not the right one for you. You’ll likely spend many hours in your own company and as someone else pointed out to me, while boards and instant messengers are great, they can also eat heavily into your working time if you’re not careful. Personally, I use the boards and chats as a treat when I’ve accomplished a goal, unless I need to talk to someone in order to get that set goal done.

If, like me, your office is in your home, in reality you never really leave work. It’s just always there and there is always something else to be done, and it’s so tempting just to work a few more hours. Having the discipline to stick to your office hours is the trick and where structure comes into play. The saying all work and no play makes Jack/Jill a dull boy/girl is really true here.

The biggest trick of all though, is learning to recognize your limits. Set them and stick to them. Unlike in the normal workplace, you won’t have the big cheese or even the little one watching over your shoulder, making sure you work or making sure that your paycheck and your bills are covered each week. That’s up to you now.

Think Before You Leap.

Another thing you need to consider is can you REALLY afford to give up your day job? Working for someone else means that for the most part you will have a reliable pay check each week or month, when you work for yourself you loose that security. There are other things to consider as well like health insurance, book keeping and how exactly you are going to pay for them. Of course if there is another bread winner in the house this may not be of such a concern, but it’s still something you should consider before you give in your slip. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re considering going it alone, don’t, at least not until you have enough cash saved to cover any outgoings you might have over a six months period.

How well do you know the law? If you think the law doesn’t affect you because your just one person working from home then think again. If you don’t know your Title 18 USC 2257 from your arse then you may be heading for trouble. Standing in front of a judge and saying I didn’t know won’t get you out of a heavy fine or even a prison sentence.

The real questions you need to ask yourself now are you up to the challenge, and do you have the personal discipline to make this work for you?

Article written by Jenne.

http://www.clitical.com.

International Billing Alternatives – Online Check Payments

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

In my previous article i discussed the value involved with Premium Rate Phone billing as an option for your adult surfers and, staying on the topic of payment processing this article will take a closer look at the Online Check payment method or, ACH as it is commonly referred to.

ACH (Online Check Payments) – What Is It?

An online check payment is a method of allowing your customers to pay for their goods using their check’s online, in order for your customer to pay via a check they need to have available certain items these are, a current checking account, a valid routing number (found on the check) and, an account number. Funds paid via online checks are automatically debited from the customers bank account.

Online Check Billing – How It Works.

Online check payments are processed in real-time, surfers are automatically accepted and authenticated via their current billing address, social security or, driving license number, once they have been authenticated their payment details are then sent to the ACH (Automated Clearing House) system where this information is automatically accepted as long as the details provided are verified as correct.

Online Check Payments – What Are The Costs?

Utilizing the online check method of billing your customers is actually just as, if not more, cost effective as using online credit or debit cards, in effect, you are guaranteed the funds of the check once they clear as, in all reality, the surfer will not have such an easy time declaring the purchase as a ‘charge back’ because the information needed to pay via an online check is information that in reality, only they have access too.

So, as with our previous articles, lets say your paysite membership fee for one month is US$35, a surfer signs up to your site using an online check, you make, approximately, US$33 from this membership for each and every month the customer (or surfer) chooses to renew their membership.

The one main advantage with online checks however is that, surfers will often feel more ‘secure’ in using them to pay for 3 or 6 month memberships and, as long as their check clears your account, you are almost certainly guaranteed the funds.

Online Check Billing – The Main Benefits.

As mentioned above already, the primary benefit of the ACH payment method is that the customer will almost certainly have funds available in their online checking account to be able to meet the cost of the paysite membership, after all, they wouldn’t give out their banking details if they were not sure the payment would go through. In addition to this advantage there are also several other advantages to using Online Checks as a payment method for example:

Increased Sales.
Reduced Order + Billing Costs.
Faster Payment.
Reduced Credit Card Charge Backs.

ACH Check Payments – Overview.

Whilst ACH check payments are a good alternative for US surfers the one major drawback is that, in today’s global market place they are not a method of payment for international surfers unfortunately, at this time, there are no companies who can offer this service to my knowledge to the ever growing global population.

That said, there is a place in the industry for check processing for adult payments and, with Visa breathing down our collective necks more and more, now would be an ideal time to take an in-depth look at this processing method.

I hope this article has provided you with some useful information regarding the online check payment method.

Article written by Lee

Newsletter Know How – A Guide To Writing Newsletters

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Writing | Response: 0

Email newsletters are a great way to make contact with existing clients and, prospective clients which makes them a great marketing tool. The biggest bonus however, over Email newsletters rather than print ones is that you have virtually no cost involved with writing and, ultimately, mailing them out.

There is a wide variety of online newsletter on the internet. however, probably the simplest form for most webmasters is the email newsletter. Email provides you with a quick way to keep your name out there, build trust with you readers and, hopefully attract a few sales. If you archive your newsletter also this is a great way to get additional pages into the search engines and, as such, it then becomes a good traffic driver to your website regardless of the amount of subscribers you have. However one of the most important benefits of having an email newsletter sent on a regular basis is that it build brand recognition of your website or business.

Your newsletter should provide information, not just of an advertising nature but that, should also be informative to your subscribers. In doing this you are offering information of value and, ultimately, ensuring that your subscribers remain. However, remember newsletters are for promoting your area of expertise not just a vehicle for revenue generation.

One of the first things you should consider when deciding to do a newsletter is the amount of commitment you will have to put towards the project. Whether you start a monthly, weekly or, daily newsletter a great deal of commitment must be made to both the newsletter and, more importantly, your subscribers. For example, We generally spend a good 3 days researching the articles that have been submitted and trying to ensure that the details contained within them are relevant at the time of sending the email, this is not an easy task especially when the adult internet is constantly developing. If you don’t have the time to research and maintain consistency in your newsletter, then don’t even consider doing one, it isn’t for you at the present time.

Now you have decided you can make the commitment required to run a successful email newsletter what do you do next? Collect email addresses. Probably one of the easiest ways to get email subscribers to join your list is to go through your current mail clients contact list and manually add those email addresses or, further still, you may even have an opt in collection program that you have been using for a while but have never really had the time to commit to writing a newsletter worthy of sending out. Remember though, an email list is only as good as the addresses contained within it. You want to run an OPT-IN email list, any other type of list will be considered Spam and, that will do you more damage than good. Of course, if you haven’t already got an email collection program you can find one online there are literally hundreds of them floating around that you can get for free from sites like http://www.hotscripts.com.

So, you now have your emails, onto writing your newsletter. I think the greatest part of email is that it is somewhat less formal than writing for print copy. Email in fact tends to be very informal in comparison. The best way at approaching writing for an email newsletter is to write how you talk, it is more enjoyable for the reader and gives your newsletter a personality that no one else can emulate. Content wise, that depends on what you do, what would YOU like to see if you subscribed to an email list of the type you are going to be running and, more importantly, what would ensure you stay subscribed to the newsletter? Ask your friends, colleagues and, peers what they would like to see in an email newsletter, often they have been looking for information that is not readily available, this is an area where you then start to provide a service that no one else does.

So you are at the point where you are starting to realize that running a newsletter is a lot of work correct? Well, it is. However, the effort, work and, time spent in putting your newsletter together will help you build a relationship with people whom, in all actuality, you may probably not ever meet in a face to face situation and, more importantly, it can become a great income generator over time.

Article written by Lee

Converting Italian Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

Continuing with our article series of country specific traffic and which niches work for the various global markets in this article we will take a look at some of the most complicated traffic to ‘work’ Italian Adult Surfers. The reason I say most complicated is for the simple reason that, to date there are very few Italian paysites this makes it harder for us as webmasters to tap into these markets especially if we ourselves, do not know what the Italian surfer is after. That said, lets get on with the article.

Italian Traffic – Quick Analysis.

As already mentioned surfers from Italy are hard to pre-qualify given that there are very few sites catering to this European market at the present time, this means that there are no sources of background information to look at or, statistical analysis’s available from other paysites.

Italian Adult Surfers – The Niches.

For one of the most affluent international markets going it comes as a surprise to see that there are almost no localized pay sites for the Italian market this made our initial filtering of the Italian traffic much harder opting for translated free sites over paysite tour pages to send the traffic to itself then, once they hit the free sites either choosing to send them back into our central hub or, to the US version pay site of the niche free site they were visiting. That said here are the results from the previous 3 (three) months of traffic that we observed.

Ebony.

The Ebony niche would appear to be the most consistent converting niche on Italian traffic however, given that almost all of the niches we used on the Italian surfers were quite evenly spread for sales (Ebony was only 5 sales in front) this, I am sure is not a good indicator and, likewise with the Japanese and Chinese traffic, this is an area of international adult marketing that should ideally be re-visited at a later day.

For Women.

Even more surprising than the fact there are very few localized paysites for Italy was the fact that the ‘For Women’ niche converted just as well as the other niches we used for our Italian traffic, of course, this at first would seem to indicate that the vast majority of surfers we had on our sites from Italy were female however, as we all know, the Straight male niche is big in gay so, there is a chance the sales we got from our Italian traffic to the For Women niche paysites we used were equally male and female.

Softcore General.

(Softcore Adult Tours) The other strange thing we noticed was that paysites we offered to our Italian surfers that were Hardcore in nature didn’t convert as well as the paysites that had softcore tours, this would lend itself to the fact that Italian porn surfers are not looking for hardcore – quite different to most other country traffic sources.

Tranny.

The transsexual niche paysites that we offered to the Italian surfers also had some good results again, this is strange given that almost every other countries surfer we sent to a tranny site didn’t convert. One other thing that comes up with this and, given the fact that the for women niche paysites we used had good results would be that perhaps the Italian surfers are interested in the more obscure niches available on the adult internet.

Italian Adult Traffic – An Overview.

All in all, as stated at the beginning of this article the Italian surfers would certainly appear at first glance to be more varied and obscure in their sexual preferences than other countries whom appear to have clear cut, well defined ‘types’ of site that interest them.

I think as mentioned above Italian traffic needs to be looked at in more depth in a future article as, to my surprise the traffic didn’t work on the niches that previously converted well for the same amounts and quality of traffic.

Article written by Lee

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

New European V.A.T Laws – Are You Prepared?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria – 20% VAT
Belgium – 21% VAT
Denmark – 25% VAT
Finland – 22% VAT
France – 19.6% VAT
Germany – 16% VAT
Greece – 18% VAT
Ireland – 21% VAT
Italy – 20% VAT
Luxembourg – 15% VAT
Netherlands – 19% VAT
Portugal – 17% VAT
Spain – 16% VAT
Sweden – 25% VAT
United Kingdom – 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? After all, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic changes of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Article written by Lee

Converting German Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

With the rapid development of US companies and webmasters looking to attract a larger percentage of international surfers and, wanting to make money off these surfers I thought it would be an idea to share the most prevalent niches for each of the international markets country specific surfers. In this first article we will take a look at the niches which convert best on German oriented surfer traffic.

German Traffic – Dispelling The Myths.

First and foremost I think it would be a good idea to let you know that, strangely enough, not all German surfers are looking for kinky, in your face sex, in fact, they pretty much have the same tendencies towards their online porn as US based surfers do, with that in mind, lets take a look at some of the niches that do convert well on German traffic.

German Traffic – The Niches.

As with any type of surfer the best way of getting them to convert is to start targeting them from the second they hit your site using Full Page Ads, localized text links and, consoles, over the last 3 (three) months we found that the niches which converted best on German porn surfers were as follows.

Amateur.

The German adult surfers we sent to several amateur sites, including live web-cam sites and paysites converted exceptionally well, it would certainly seem from the last three months of stats that German porn surfers like the ‘amateur’ porn angle when it comes to satisfying themselves online.

Teen.

As with the US adult surfer, it would appear that the teen niche is truly a global requisite in fact, the teen niche was one of our best converting niches across the globe when we analyzed our international traffic conversion ratios.

Gay.

To our surprise the little German traffic we did send to localized German gay sites converted at less than 1:75, bearing in mind that the best converting niche for us was Teen and, that the specific site we sent the teen traffic to converted overall at around 1:138 we will be targeting a lot more German gay traffic in the future.

Fetish.

No mystery here, when we started our filtering process we ensured that the various fetish niches were high on our filtering list, after all, everyone seems to know that German porn surfers are looking for the hard to find hardcore scene and, the general fetish niche seemed to work wonderfully.

Ebony.

The ebony niche was a vary profitable one for the traffic we filtered to it, in summary, my personal feelings are that it converted so well because ebony men and women in Germany are very few and far between, again the results for this niche would seem to back-up the fact that giving Germans access to something that might be ‘taboo’ in their country converts their traffic well.

Other Niches.

In addition to the above niches which converted above and beyond the others we used we did get a few sales to some more micro-niched paysites for example, BBW, Asian, Cumshot and General Hardcore sites had around 3-5 sales per site, per pay period. Given that we did not target this type of traffic as effectively as we could have done and, that the traffic was from TGP’s and Geo Targeted Traffic Brokers we were happy with the results we saw.

German Adult Traffic – The Results.

It would seem, given our results from the 3 month test we ran on our traffic that the top converting niches for German adult surfers are the Amateur, Teen and Gay niches. Although, the rest of the niches we filtered out our traffic to did not convert as we would have hoped we still saw a good rate of sales month on month from the previous pay period.

When all is said and done, as long as you have German porn surfers on your sites you would be wise to start spreading and filtering this traffic to some niches that, perhaps you wouldn’t have ordinarily targeted after all, a sale is more money in your pocket, whether you know the niche or not.

Article written by Le

Writing A Business Plan – The First Step To Success

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Forms & Contracts, Writing | Response: 0

Regardless of what type of business you want to run be it a bakery, a funeral home or an online marketing empire the one thing that you will require is a business plan however, having never taken any business basics 101 classes what do you need to have and, what is required in your business plan?

That is what we will touch on in this brief article from the basics to the not-so-basics by using a few simple steps you can be sure your business plan will contain all the information you need to make it up the ladder of success.

Information Summary.

As the name suggest this is a simple summary of what you are hoping to achieve from the name of your business, the goals, the concept and your plans. This should actually be no longer than two pages so that you can fill the needed information out clearly and concisely.

Business Details.

This will be the founding information of your business again you need to mention your business name, what type of business you will be running (Sole Trader, Partnership, Corporation, etc) in addition you will also need to include details of who the company owners are, whether it be yourself alone or a list of your business partners, this information will be invaluable to you at a later date you also need to include a brief history of the business whether you have been running it already for a number of days, weeks, month or, years.

Products And Services.

Basically, you need to write what exactly it is you will be selling. Are you going to be selling baked goods, marketing services or custom solutions. Keep this section simple, if you need to go into depth then do so at the end of your business plan by way of an appendices. Once you have listed several of the products or services you will be selling you should also list the features and benefits (Marketing points) of the products and services in addition, why do you think your business idea will succeed, what do you offer your clients that no-one else currently does? In addition you also need to have a basic pricing structure planned out, this will assist you in the future as, from your initial plans you can see what, if anything needs to be changed.

Marketing.

A business is more than just an idea. You need to have good pricing, affordable suppliers and a great marketing plan. This is what is also needed in your overall business plan. You should include details of your competitors products and how they compare to your own or, if applicable why your product will be a benefit to the market place should it not already be readily available. In addition the marketing section of your business plan should include a list of advantages as well as some of the pitfalls you are likely to see. You also need to include a section detailing your specific marketing strategies regarding your overall and individual products and services.

Industry Economics.

This area should detail some of the more specific areas of the industry you are going to be working in for example, what type of industry are you entering, how does the future for this industry look and, more importantly, how many existing companies work this industry as well as how do you successfully launch yourself into the industry. Parts of this area you may have covered in the marketing and previous section non the less, go over them again here in more detail.

Target Market.

We have detailed the business ideas and products and services but, what about your potential clients? What does your product offer then that they need which no other company does? What is your target client base? How will you reach your customers? All of this and more needs to be addressed in this area of your business plan.

Competing Companies.

What do your competitors do and, more importantly, who are they? Make a list of your potential competitors and address their weaknesses and strengths ensure that you leave no stone unturned when getting this information together often, you will realize that there are things your competition is doing that you can do much better then they.

Don’t forget to address their marketing, what are they doing right and, more importantly to you, what are they doing wrong? How can you capitalize on this and make their errors benefit your long term business plans.

Location, Location, Location.

Location is everything and, this is particularly true in business for example, will you be working from an office, from your home or even your garage, do you require any special permits to operate your business? Can your customers reach you easily? All of these items and more need to be considered when writing this area of your business plan. By addressing any and all of these items you will find yourself with a much clearer picture of what is needed of you and your business.

Stock + Supplies.

Often overlooked in business plans the one thing you NEED to have is a list of potential suppliers and sub-contractors who can provide you with your products and services. What materials (if any) do you need? How much will these cost you? Where will you find your stock and supplies? By getting this information available now you will have a better idea once your business plan is laid out as to what you are able to offer easily and also it will enable you to lay your pricing structure out more concisely.

Labor.

So you have this great business idea all laid out but, who will be running this for you? Do you need additional staff or are you going it alone? Do you need to setup accountants, lawyers, insurance companies, consultants, bank accounts etc etc? All of these aspects of your business need to be laid out here.

Capital.

Money, as they say, makes the world go round. Your business is no different, how much financial outlay do you require to get your business off the ground? Do you need to ask for a loan from your banking facility to help you out? How much income are you planning on making within the next 6 to 12 months? How much of this income needs to be invested back into the business? All of these ‘financial’ question need to be answered in this area of your business plan only then will you begin to see the bigger picture of your business idea.

Hopefully this article has given you some solid advice and information regarding planning for your new business and, once you have all of the above laid out you should be able to see whether you will succeed or fail in your new idea.

Also, by planning now for the future of your business you should hopefully be able to avoid any hidden costs which can often push a company to the edge.

Article written by Lee

Quick Loading Pages Plus Saving Bandwidth

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Have you noticed how many of the sites out there are trying to make themselves look better than they actually are by using heavy graphics and media files? The fact of the matter is this, most surfers who visit your we pages are viewing them on a screen that is between 15 and 19 inches wide, can only see 216 colors and, are on a connection of 33.6 kb per second (If they are lucky).

What Does All This Mean?

What does this mean to you as a webmaster? Simple, try this test.

Connect to the internet on a 33.6 connection, type in your url and, hold your breath. Does the page load before you need to start gasping for air? If so then you are designing your sites correctly, if not, your pages are far to big in file size.

I’m pretty sure that some of you can hold your breath for a long period of time so, here is a basic rule of web design. Your pages should, be no larger in file size than 50k in fact, I would even go so far as to say try getting your pages under 30k in size.

How Can I Get It Under 50K? 30K?

First, all your graphic images should be as small as possible. Try to get them smaller than 4k. Going up to 6k is reasonable. When designing a graphic for the web site keep in mind the number of colors being used.

I know, from designing banners myself, it was hard for me to go from millions of color to only 216. Yes, 216 is the number of colors you have on a web safe color pallet.

Use solid colors when designing your image. PhotoShop has made the gradient such a popular tool. It looks good to fade things in and out. I always see a background border made up of this gradient. I always right click on that image to see the size. The 8k-12k is not worth the space. The problem with the gradient is it uses many colors and dithering. Both take up big time K. The more color you have in an image the bigger it’s going to be.

Use design more, graphics less. For a web page to be successful it needs to download quickly and look good.

Here is the dilemma download quick or look good? Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpgs to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make borders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there.

Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means keep it. If the answer is “well maybe” or “it just looks good there”, yank it.

Your surfers will appreciate not waiting more then they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.

Article written by Lee