Business service offerings and liquidity

“Being all things to all people” sounds good, but in most cases it reduces the liquidity of a business. Business liquidity encompasses the number of prospective buyers, the business valuation, and the amount of time required to market the then close the deal.

• The most liquid scenario is a co-located web hosting client base, with no data center, offices, or employees, and only one owner/decision maker. This type of business can be under contract to be sold within 48 hours. (Post ‘Letter of Intent’ due diligence, contract preparation, integration plans etc. all take a bit of time.)

• The least liquid scenario is a web hosting company, which offers design services, has offices, a data center, and offers related services such as access, marketing services etc.

Valuation Difference:

Something I have seen many times is the owner/decision maker on the sell side has heard web hosting company valuation formulas and wants to apply that formula to his company. Inevitably the owner is disappointed when the offer comes up short in their mind, and passes on what actually is a fair valuation.

Design Services:

The decision to staff up and start offering web design services to complement the pure play hosting recurring revenue is a huge decision with regards to the effect on business liquidity. Of course design services can be a natural fit with hosting clients by helping to reduce client churn and up selling existing clients. However, the value of the revenue and cash flow generated from one-time design jobs is no where near the value of the recurring hosting revenue and cash flow.

Negatives of design departments when it comes time to sell:

• From the buyer’s perspective, acquiring the entire company and keeping the design efforts going is risky. It’s 50/50 whether the key design people will stick around after closing … regardless what they or the seller states. In addition, if you have to replace key people, the new staff will not have the relationships with the client base.

• From the buyer’s perspective, acquiring the entire company then canceling the design efforts is usually a risky decision as well. There are offices to deal with in addition to staff which needs to be let go … both time consuming and detrimental to the existing client base.

• My estimate is for every 20 buyers of a pure play hosting company, there are only 1-2 buyers for hosting design shop combo’s.

Internet Data Center:

Investing in an IDC may increase the value of the entire company by an enormous amount over time, but definitely reduces the liquidity in the short run. Typically smaller web host co-locate in the beginning, then at a later date acquire their own data center. In turn, the company will then offer space to other smaller host hence creating yet another service offering.

Owning an underutilized data center reduces the number of one type of buyer … the “cash flow buyer”, yet invites a new category of buyer, the “asset and cash flow buyer”. The later buyer is looking to both grow through acquisitions and make the swap from co-location to owning the data center. The less remaining capacity of the data center, the more of a cash flow type deal it will be, hence usually more liquid.

5 steps to a successful internet business

STEP 1. Find something you feel is a good business opportunity. You can scour the internet for all sorts of different business ideas and opportunities. Doing a search on any search engine with the keywords Work At Home, Business Opportunities, Home Based Business, Affiliate Programs, Make Money Online, etc., will produce 1000's of different search results. Affiliate programs are THE ABSOLUTE BEST business opportunities out there because the ONLY thing you need to do to run your internet business is to market your affiliate link. With a traditional business you must deal with inventory, storage, packing, shipping, complaints, returns, phone calls, emails, checks and credit cards just to name a few! Not so with affiliate programs, once someone has clicked on your affiliate link your only job is getting the next person to click on it. Sweet deal!

STEP 2. Get your own webpage. You want to put your internet business on a webpage of your own. A webpage is like a store front. It projects respect to your business and who you are. Think about it. Do you feel the same about buying from a vendor on the street as you do about buying from a person in a store? They’re both vendors, but the store gives you a certain feeling about the person you are buying from that a street vendor just can’t give you! Your webpage dose not have to be fancy. If you only have a brief description of what your webpage is about along with individual descriptions of your product or products people will respect that. If it is affiliate programs you have decided upon, simply put a BRIEF description of what is being offered along with your affiliate link. Do not disclose too much in your description because people might THINK they know what it is all about and not click on your link. You want to let your affiliate website do all the selling for you. These sites are professionally designed to maximize the number of people who buy or join so a brief description, just enough to spike their curiosity, is sufficient.

STEP 3. Get your own Blog and make one post a day. A Blog, short for, “Web Log,” is a great way to establish yourself as an authority figure on whatever topic you decide. As people return to read your daily articles, they will eventually come to view you as an authority on whatever your Blog is about. They will eventually develop confidence in what you are saying, and will begin to trust you. As a result some people will check out your webpage to see what you have to offer them, and people tend to buy more from people they know and trust. Their confidence in you will be an additional factor that will compel people to buy from you. There are many places online that will host and let you set up your Blog for free.

STEP 4. Put Cost-Per-Click(CPC) advertising such as Google AdSense on your website. Having Cost-Per-Click advertising on your website is a way to earn additional income that can be VERY substantial. Most people who visit your website will not buy from you. If people are going to leave your website, wouldn’t you rather them leave through a link on your website that will pay you money every time someone clicks on it? Google makes putting their AdSense on your website E-A-S-Y! The ads are relevant to the content of your website. Google can even put its AdSense on your Blog as we’ll.

STEP 5. Write and submit articles to article submission sites. This is the most important advice you need to know. This is how you will get FREE advertising! People are searching the internet for free information. When you submit your articles online, the search engines will eventually find them and will spider every word. When people do a search using keywords or phrases that are in your articles, they will turn up in the search results, so be sure to insert highly searched for keywords and phrases into your articles! You will need to include at the bottom of all your articles your bio. Your bio will contain a brief description about who you are along with a link to your website. It might read for instance [ John Doe is the owner of yoursite. com. John helps people to work at home using various business opportunities that include affiliate programs. If you desire your own home based business visit yoursite. com] The more articles you write and submit, the higher the chances are of your articles keywords and phrases showing up on search results. The more links you have pointing back to your website, the higher your websites page rank with the search engines will be, meaning the higher up on the search results will your article turn up, so don’t stop writing and submitting articles! I do want to stress however, quality over quantity. Take your time and check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. No one will take what you have to say seriously if you don’t write correctly.

So there you have it! Having a successful internet business is simply a matter of understanding how things work, and applying that knowledge. It dose not take any special skill or any great intelligence. If you follow these five steps, you cannot fail. The most important thing, as with anything in life, is persistence. Continue following steps three and five and watch your internet business grow!

How to use adsense tricks to benefit your site and boost profits

Adsense is really making waves and making its presence felt especially on the affiliate industry. The result of this is that most of the weak affiliate merchants have disappeared. Likewise ad networks are beginning to lose their customers due to Google’s adsense.

If you are a web site owner and you’re losing more rather gaining using affiliate programs that you are advertising then I guess it’s high time that you consider shifting to adsense marketing and start earning which is what you should be doing in the first place.

The best thing about Google is that the adsense that they will put on your site are carefully chosen to match the content on your pages, which is good since your web visitors have a much better chance of clicking on them since they are related to the information that they have search on your site.

Another benefit that you derived from this is that it enhances further the usefulness of your site since other related information that are not found on your site is conveniently supplied by Google through its adsense. This is actually just one of adsense trick.

With Google’s adsense you will no longer have to waste time and effort in choosing various types of ads for the different pages of your site. Google has made everything easy as well as convenient for you. There are no difficult codes to deal with all you get are ads that are carefully chosen to match every contents found on your site.

This will provide you with lots of time to do other important things like creating better and quality contents since most of the search engines considered contents as one of their basis in choosing the sites where they are to put their ads.

Another great thing about Google adsense is that even if you have already existing affiliate links on your site your site will still be allowed to add adsense ads. This means that you will be able to still earn from adsense ads. Plus you may even customize the adsense so that it will appear as part of your web page. You use Google’s custom palette for such an endeavor.

The rationale behind matching the adsense to the theme of your site is that most of the web visitors today are used to clicking on a link that is blue. By having your Google adsense to match the theme of your web page will make it looks like a part or portion of your content. This adsense trick is ideal since it will make the web visitors to click on it thinking that it’s just a link to another page of the web site.

Aside from that you will also be able to filter out those URLs that do not meet your guidelines. You may also block your competitor from advertising on your site. Bear in mind that the fact still remains that adsense is somewhat competing for some space on web sites that all other revenue generating ads are sharing.

With adsense on your web page together with your content people will definitely flock on your site sicne yo have everything that they need. In the long run having an adsense on your site will both benefit you in terms of increase in revenue as well as increase in your web site’s hits.

How to win more from the casinos

It may be for the excitement, it may be for a vacation but it is the dream of going home a big winner that keeps us going back to the casinos, but are there ways other then cheating that can help you take home more cash? The answer is yes.

Believe it or not gambling at on online casino is a great way to gain experience so that you can win some big money in the casinos.

May online casinos besides having games as low as 50 cents, also have practice rooms that are free. You are given some play money to make your bets, but no real money is exchanged.

These practice rooms are available for most of the different casino games like poker, blackjack, roulette and baccarat.

This is a great way to gain experience. Not only do you get to play, you also get the experience of playing against other people instead of a computer. This allows you to learn how to watch their betting habits to look for patterns. This may not be so important in a game like roulette or craps but in poker this is almost as important as the cards you are dealt.

These patters are called tells. A tell is when someone gives away their hand by an involuntary action.

Some common tells are the way players arrange their cards, or playing with their chips when they have a good hand, or rubbing their face when they are bluffing

In a practice poker room you also get the experience of learning how to watch your money, without losing your shirt when you make a mistake, which will happen at first.

On of the biggest problems with learning to gamble in a casino is that the dealer and the other players are not forgiving. By this I mean let’s say you are playing roulette, a first time player may not know that until all winnings are placed on the table you may not take your winnings. Getting a warning from the dealer the first time you play can be embarrassing and unnerving to a new player.

So by playing in an online casino at first you will learn the rules, procedures and the etiquette for playing in a land based casino.

If poker is your game it is a little different, most games depend on luck and all you really need to know if the basics, but poker is totally different because you are playing against other layers that know all this information already. when you feel confident enough then go to the casino and find the game you want to play and spend some time watching the other players. You want to find a table where all the players are less skilled then you. This will give you the edge, but make sure you watch carefully. Many times players will do things to make themselves look worse then they really are to give the other players a false confidence.

Then as you see yourself getting better and better you can move up to higher stakes tables and against better players.

Once you get confident and see your skills increase so will your bank account.

Does your website need some captcha

Many Business website owners have faced this problem: They want to provide a function on their site for visitor’s to send feedback to them without opening the floodgates to spammers.

Posting your email address on your website is generally an invitation for spam. Automated programs better known as “bots” will eventually scan your website and parse out your email address from the rest of the source code and use it for purposes other than what you intended.

There are various tricks and techniques to “cloak” your email address so that these bots do not easily find it. One method I’ve used is to include Javascript in my webpage that pieces together the email address when the page is displayed to the user. With this method there is not a valid email address in the page source itself. It seems to work fairly well, but some “junk mail” does still make it thru.

Another technique is to not post your email address at all on your website, but rather provide a “Feedback” or “Guestbook” type form where visitors can enter comments and then submit using the website form. This keeps the email address off the website completely by making use of a server side script which is activated when the visitor submits the form. Generally this script then formats an email message and sends it to the website owner using an email program on the server itself. The actual email address is encoded in the script or a database and is not available to outside visitors.

These feedback type forms help, but it is still possible to automate the entry of these forms, with the resulting “spam” being received. It does raise the bar, so to speak, in making it more difficult to automate but not impossible.

A better option to use along with these website forms is CAPTCHA. You’ve probably seen this in use on large websites with user signup pages. Before submitting the form, the user is required to read some distorted letters on the screen and enter them as verification. The idea is that the distorted letters or characters cannot be interpreted by computer programs so that the web form being submitted is automatically validated as originating from a human being rather than some automated program.

CAPTCHA is actually an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The term is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University and was started in 2000, so it’s not been around too long. In reality a CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade different kinds of tests that most humans can pass, but computer programs can not pass. The most common one known is the distorted letters and numbers test. A CAPTCHA must be fully automated without any user intervention, which makes it a reasonable option for website owners.

Adding a CAPTCHA program to your site helps provide a reliable method to validate that the information being submitted is from a real, live human and not from some automated program. The use of CAPTCHA is becoming more widespread and is not just on the major websites any longer. A lot of site integration examples can be found in the common website programming languages.

Some good resources to get started with CAPTCHA can be found at:

- captcha. net/

- en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Captcha

Does your new business need a website

If you are starting a new business there are many things you need to keep in mind, and starting a website to market your products online is one of the most important aspects of your new business.

There are many reasons why should start a website that include saving money, convenience, more customers, professional image, and keeping up with the competition.

You will save money when you market your company via a website because this medium is always available for potential visitors. Because of this, on your website you can provide a significant amount of information that customers are looking for.

Frequently asked questions are important because most of the time customers have similar questions. So, if you go ahead and answer these questions on your website you will not have to spend the time and money required to answer them again because they are basically self service. Also, make sure you provide detailed contact information for individuals that need to contact you for whatever reason. Selling items on your website is also a good way to make money and it allows customers to shop whenever they want.

There is nothing more convenient than the Internet to provide information, shopping, or the like at any time of the day or night all year round. Because of this, company’s with websites experience a lot of traffic when the actual store is otherwise closed. This is because people enjoy logging online when they have free time whether it be at night or on the weekends.

Because of this convenience, your website will garner more customers for you, especially if you have a detailed website. The reason for this is more and more frequently individuals use the Internet in order to search for information on a wide variety of things. So, if they are searching for what you offer and you have a website then you will have more customers. The day and age of yellow pages will soon be over because the generation of the Internet is growing up using this medium to find information. So, if you have a website you will offer Internet users the ability to find information online.

In addition to these many benefits, you will also be displaying a professional image if you have a website. The reason for this is a website shows you are serious about your business, about providing information to potential clients, and staying in touch with technology and the speed of business. You will want individuals to know your company is serious, so build a website in order to show your importance.

Beyond all of this, you will also want to keep up with the competition. If they have websites and you do not, it is obvious who will win the race. The best thing to do is to evaluate your competitor’s websites and then make yours better.