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As soon as you have added your enterprise listing in Google Places you prospects have easy entry to you on Google Maps. It is an effective, particularly user helpful mapping company which will give your prospective purchasers your location with straightforward to abide by instructions and your speak to info.

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I never know when companies are in trouble. After all, all we tend to see is the store fronts, the television adverts and the smiling faces in the shops greeting us. Boots, it seems, has been struggling behind that happy veneer for a long while. While on my way into Nottingham, as it turns out the home of Boots’ head office, I discovered that the company was set to shed about seven hundred jobs, many of them from their head offices in the region.

Many of these companies are often extremely top heavy; with management and middle management’s wages filling up an enormous wage bill while stores at ground level are being closed and minimum wage jobs are being cut in an effort to save costs; costs that are a fraction of the overall overheads. Boots are just the latest in a long line of companies too slow to adjust to modern requirements, too slow to streamline their management structures.

SEO has been an alien concept to me. I knew what it was, obviously, and had an idea about how it worked but since I’ve started working freelance as a content writer for such companies it has really opened my eyes up to how these things work in practice and just what they can offer companies through their work. Obviously getting seen on the front page of Google is important; but what else do these companies offer with so much competition for that first page?
Social media does, of course, play a huge role. With more people seeing your company then, hopefully, more people are engaging with you on social media. That means more followers, more likes and higher popularity. This all leads to the one thing that companies want; an increased revenue. More impressions, more followers, more customers and more money. Just a little bit of help from an SEO company could really help your business.

In a dark corner of the internet there existed a forum called Gaming Age Forum, or GAF for short. A place where people gathered to chat about games and the industry. The clients were diverse; fans, developers, publishers and enthusiasts alike all joining together and exercising their minds in discussion. The forum slowly subsided though, with one of the fans taking up the rails when the forums went under.

Then came NeoGAF. Under the stewardship of a new owner the forum has seen millions of signups; while the developers are still members they post less frequently given the sheer volume of people who might interpret the news in any kind of nonsensical ways. Despite that the forum’s popularity continues to grow, with many news sites using NeoGAF as origins for their work. Even during the hectic E3 events NeoGAF remains popular; with stories breaking and news leaking every single minute.

The biggest businesses in the world can cover all bases. There is not a department that they can’t staff; if they need food they build a catering department, they need PR, they’ve got it covered, there is simply nothing that they cannot afford or staff. But what about you guys? What about your business? For those smaller sized companies that cannot afford to throw money at departments and keep permanent staff for jobs that maybe they don’t need full time.

Outsourcing then becomes an option; or using other companies on a consulting basis. There are specific companies that can help with your PR for specific campaigns, rather than working with you full time when campaigns are on the backburner. For things like website design it might be cheaper to opt for a one time consultancy fee, with the option to call back for any issues, instead of having a full time web department.

Your business needs a website. I am sorry for laying it out so plainly; but your company simply cannot reach its full potential if it does not have an online presence. Building a website can be expensive and time consuming for anyone; not just those with little experience, even people with years of experience online can find themselves tied up in design, in domain names and in expenses. One of the main expenses is tied up in that design element; you need to make the decision on whether or not to code your own website, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are a coding and web wizard (or have the time to commit to learning), the other choice is to use a third party website to help you design it.

This would always be my choice, in fact all of the websites I have made over the years have been through them. You choose the type of website you want; a portfolio, a shop or a blog, and then go about designing the website from back to front. This is an easy way to make beautiful, clean and professional looking websites from scratch.

With the increased level of competition in virtually all business niches, web marketing comes as a major convenience for most businesses, thanks to its flexibility and versatility. The internet offers a vast platform of opportunities for businesses, eliminating most of the hurdles faced in most conventional marketing practices and at a fraction of the costs.

The Benefits of Marketing on the Web

Websites offer a portal to the virtue world, allowing you to conduct business online securely and with ease. They also offer other crucial factors such as:

Cost savings

There are many options when it comes to the strategies you can use to market your business online. While some may involve professional internet advertising campaigns and SEO optimisation, others require that you only bond online. What’s more, most of these strategies come at a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing strategies while also offering better and quicker results. (more…)

There is a fairly new phenomenon in football that has shaped the financial landscape over the past few years. Before that clubs were free to spend whatever amounts of money that they wanted to or felt necessary to compete and win competitions across the world. That, of course, meant that a few clubs shot to prominence with the financial backing of billionaires from across the globe. Some flourished, the problem, however, was that some clubs spent beyond their means and struggled when success didn’t follow.

Financial Fair Play was brought in to try and protect from the second problem. Clubs have gone bankrupt, liquidated and been in financial turmoil for years after spending too much. Financial Fair Play is a rule that means clubs can no longer spend beyond their means; limiting transfer budgets respective to money being brought in to the club through television deals, advertising revenue and player sales. It is still early days, but the early signs are very promising.

The one thing a business simply cannot afford to do, whether it be a multi billion dollar company or the local green grocer, is lose money. Money, income and, more specifically, profit are the lifeblood of all businesses. Many companies do, however, lose money – whether it be in their quarterly fiscals or for their overall financial year. We all know that losing money for a business is bad news, but what areas can companies look at to try and earn some of it back, without trimming their workforce?

Many people consider smaller losses to be acceptable in running a business and, granted, you will lose a small bit of money in cases like out of date stock, or over ordering on equipment by mistake or out of safety. However, working for a multi billion pound company has opened my eyes to that kind of “small” expense adding up. People over stock, people over order, people don’t stock rotate properly allowing hundreds of pounds worth of equipment to pass its expiry date, effectively wasting that money.

The legal system and business have a very interconnected relationship, with the business decisions having to be informed by legal expertise at every step of the way. The legal system can provide useful information regarding employment policies, taxes, credit collection, and a lot more besides these.

Even with all the ways that it can be beneficial to have a relationship with a legal firm, that doesn’t mean that you need to pay a legal retainer. A legal retainer is a payment that you pay in advance of the casework that a lawyer does on your behalf. This money can then be used to fund the legal process involved in the work they’re doing, but it does have some negative aspects. Firstly, the money is what they expect they’ll need, which means that there may be some left over. In these cases the lawyer should return the money, but sometimes the process can become complicated, leading to further legal action being necessary.