Business trends are changing everywhere and every kind of business. Think about any business you can imagine about, it has been changed the way it used to be over the time. If you can not catch the changing trend, you are likely losing a lot. How you smell the trend? How to prepare yourself for the change? How do you know which trend works and which not? Definitely you should be able to judge your intuition.

Follow the media. You will see all sorts of discussions on different subject areas like business, real estate, fashion, travel, education, personal life, investment opportunities, technology trends, innovations, innovators and many others. Just keep your eyes open to these media. You can spot a lot of information about the latest trends, future prospects and business opportunities from media.

As you see, most of the business today are people centric. People chose the trend. When you read papers or listen to the news and discussions in TV, Radio or when you talk to your customers in your store, listen to their interest. Try to find out where is your customers are heading? Try to segment your market, what segment of your customers are choosing which trend? You must learn from the trends. There are not only the new trends on product interests, its use and designs, but also there are new trends in reaching to your target market, the way you present yourself and also the way you present the contents. Businesses use celebrities as brand ambassadors to endorse their brands. Ads include customer testimonials. Ads use children as brand promoters. Products are launched in YouTube.com with video demos. Products and services are promoted using blogs. Event notifications are sent through mobile SMS. A lot more …. trends….

Do these trends help you, the entrepreneurs?

Look out of the box and gather the information from different channels. Read the business, technology and fashion magazines. Browse the Internet and watch the TV shows where people discuss their way of life, business and culture. Just need to start thinking and looking out of the box. You are with the trend.

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User-driven online services have captured all possible attentions from almost everyone. A wide spectrum of web technology based philosophy is emerging known as web 2.0. These technologies are based on user participation, collaboration among users, sharing contents and easy information dissemination. The rising popularity of user-driven online services, including MySpace, Google Maps, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, digg, truemores, squidoo, all kinds of blogs, mashups and many more, has drawn attention to a group of technological developments known as Web 2.0. These technologies, which rely on user collaboration, include Web services, peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts, and online social networks.

Companies use the Web to reach customers throughout the decision-making process. The McKinsey conducted a survey on “How businesses are using Web 2.0″. The participating companies in the survey cited that “Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that
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Internet is the opportunity. Any one can create new business in Internet if you have ideas and passion. To make your business visible and heard, your website is the first recommendable tool. If you sell products and services, you need to have an e-commerce site.

E-commerce web site design is nothing different than a traditional web design, but requires a few more extra functionalities and components to handle financial transactions. For those additional services, you will have to rely on third parties. Many startups are intimidated by the process and they do not build web sites that are capable of e-commerce transactions. I am trying to give you just a brief idea of what it takes to design e-commerce sites. I will write different aspects of online business in my future posts. Suggest you to study some of the these aspects of e-commerce site development before you start.
This will help you understand how e-commerce site development differs from regular web site development, and will also help you to build web sites that accomplish desired purpose.

Transaction Security

One of the most important aspects of e-commerce web site design is security that creates confidence in consumers doing online transactions. You need to make sure that your visitors can safely and securely input their personal details, credit card information and shipping information into your online payment system. To build web sites that are secure, you will need to protect pages with the encryption of Secure Socket Layer (SSL). SSL encrypts the information transferred from
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E-policies may not be required by law, but if you have one in place, they can keep your business out of legal trouble. E-policy is a corporate statement or set-of-rules defined by organization to protect the organization from casual or intentional abuse that could result in the release of sensitive information, IT system failures or litigation against the organization by employees or other parties.

With the growth of Internet and e-mails, it is easy for everyone to send and receive documents that are confidential or copyrighted. These actions could be damaging and may result in unwanted legal harassments. Receiving external documents containing viruses is another burning problem these days, which could harm or seriously damage your system and cause severe disruption to the organization.

Browsing the irrelevant web sites and be unproductive in their assigned role is another issue causing employers headache.

Technology is only part of the solution and can only help you enforce your policy. The responsibility for successful e-policy lies with both management and employees. Management needs to decide what is appropriate to the organization, lay down a set of rules or guidelines (a policy) and inform all employees of this. Employees need to understand the risks to the organization and ramifications of not following the procedures laid down.

No matter how small your company, here are some steps you need to take:

• Implement an e-policies addressing employee use of e-mail, the Internet, software piracy and ethical use of e-resources. That should be an integral part of the employee handbook
• Everybody in the organization should be educated about the details written in e-policy.
• Provide clear guidance, if possible give examples and templates, on what is and is not appropriate to communicate via e-mail.
• Let everybody know how much personal use of Internet and e-mail is acceptable.
• Prepare and enact a risk management policy that incorporates policies on e-mail and other electronic documents retention, deletion, passwords and filtering.
• Implement a computer and network security policy to keep hackers and other intruders out of your system.

Many of the above issues can be addressed by use of some form of technology, but only the technology can not help to enforce policies. It is no use having a police force if there are no laws for them to uphold.

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The blogosphere is one of the biggest achievements of the decade which changed the meaning and perceived values of different things that were established over the centuries. No technology brought the people’s participation so engaging than the blogs ever before. Blogging has become medium for expressing aspirations, promoting business, connecting people, making consensus and for thousands of many other reasons. Hundreds of millions of people world wide either run blogs or participate and contribute to them.

I am trying to list here few of the reasons why people blog. Write your reasons in comment area to expand and make this list more comprehensive. People are motivated and engaged tirelessly to operate blogs for one or more of the following reasons.

To make money
This is the most motivating reason people start blogging. They create blogs to generate traffic that they make money from Google adSense and other click and impression based ads providers. If blog traffic is high, you get advertisements more easily.

To establish and enhance brand
Small and large businesses today run blogs to enhance their another business or sell another product/service. People are
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A couple of days ago I talked about how to increase/generate business leads from referrals. Leads may be from different sources - referrals from friends, associates, clients, web site, email campaigns, search engine marketing, trade fairs and others. When we talk about the conversion rate from your web site or blog or any other kind of online presence, it refers to the number of web visitors who completes a sales transaction or performs the desired marketing activity you offered online to visitors. There are different ways to increase conversion rates, depending on the type of company and even the industry the company is in. Higher the conversion rate, better the return of investment. Conversion can be integrated with your traditional marketing as well, converting traffic from all sources that I listed above. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy.

Let me give you some tips:

1. Be prompt to response on leads. People don’t wait you unless you are really outstanding among others. Provide live help features if possible.
2. Offer different contact channels so that people can contact you easily - email, instant messenger, Skype, land phone and cell numbers
3. Increase the referrals, word of mouth.
4. Learn to ask for sale.
5. Write personalized message making customers feel special. Make sure you mean it.
6. Subscribe to popular online marketplaces
7. Use some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System to manage and properly track leads
8. Prepare your strong portfolio of your products and services
9. Take help of copy writing professionals to write your marketing material
10. Improve the layout and aesthetics of your site with thorough usability testing, so that your site visitors can easily find the things what they are looking for.

I am sure you will see a difference if you apply the tips I listed today.

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First of all, you need to decide why you should go online. Proving the “social proof” you can say “Everybody going online, so I go online.” Or you may say “My competitors are already online. I’m already late”. You may come up with hundreds of reasons to go online. Most important thing is that you need to decide if online presence complements your business goals and fulfills its objectives. Get ready with the following before you launch your online business:

Online Mission:
What’s your online mission? What do you want to achieve going online? What are the benefits for you if you go online? What objectives are fulfilled through online presence? Are your target customers Internet users? Is your business going to be 100% online?

Look at what others doing:
Before making your own online strategy, find out what are your competitors doing online and what are they trying to do. Find out what message they are trying to convey to their prospective customers. Are they successful? Visit the websites of other businesses related to yours. Learn how they are trying to attract
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Your sales effort to companies becomes successful only if you can identify the person with whom you’re speaking is the right person and he has got the authority to make a purchase. Most of the time, marketers spend their time approaching to wrong person, who doesn’t have any authority to purchase. The same is true when you are pursuing your product and services by email marketing to companies. You have got email database of 100,000 people from different organizations, but you don’t know who reads your emails. Did you check your response rate? How genuine the responses are? What per cent of responses turned into deals? I am sure, your answer is “very few”. So why you send sales emails to someone who can’t make the purchase decisions?

If you are planning for product or service campaign, the very first task in your list should be the preparation of contact list of CEOs or Chief Procurement Officers (CPO), who are involved in the daily operation of the organization. If not, contacts of VPs also ok. Contacts of board chairman or board members are not much effective. Most of the marketers feel comfortable contacting operation level staffs and they are more accessible. In some cases discussions of sales with those staffs work but in
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One more payment services provider in the market after PayPal and Google Checkout!

Amazon recently published an announcement in their Amazon web services Newsletter to Web service developers about their upcoming Online Payment System. According to the newsletter, the Beta version will be ready for testing very soon. Amazon already have Amazon Payments, but the new service will provide visitors to your site to use Amazon account to pay you for any product or service. It will also offer subscription and controlled access to content. The service will provide sites to use Amazon to manage payments between users and receive confirmation of transactions. This will be really useful for the online fund management services, definitely, it will be micro payments though.

You will be able to verify the status of any transactions to make sure that the user has not rescinded it. Amazon will provide the Web service API for payment processing and developers will be able to customize as per the need of online merchants. Since Amazon is running extremely successful Amazon Web Services and already having widespread users of the service, it won’t take much time for Amazon to compete with the existing market leaders.

Today, PayPal is the most popular payment service among small businesses. But it is sure that now the competition will be not so easy. For us, the more payment service providers compete, more choices for better service.

We will Watch Out, who will win the payment services market - PayPal? Google Checkout? or Amazon?

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