I asked Robert to tell his story about how he set up his U.S. based online retail store, selling fitness equipment, while running it from his home in Melbourne, Australia. Here is his response.

“Like most people who are interested in earning a living online, I believed all those ‘gurus’ I found on the internet who all say the same thing, ‘anyone can run any business anywhere and from anywhere’. It’s a beguiling message to new online entrepreneurs but I soon found out that this wasn’t true.”

About eighteen-months ago, Robert wanted to quit his nine-to-five job and run his own online store. The only problem was he had no money. Therefore, he decided to operate his store using the drop ship model – this is where the retailer holds no stock but has signed an agreement with a supplier to retail its products. Then, when a customer places an order, the order is sent to the supplier and the goods are sent directly to the customer. Drop ship offers would-be retailers the opportunity to begin selling goods from their site without having any inventory and with very little start up costs.

However, it was when he got into the mechanics of setting up his business that it soon became apparent that the business needed to be grounded somewhere.

“In order to be accepted as a dealer for a supplier’s goods I needed to operate through a business. Without a business, real wholesalers simply won’t deal with you. Obviously, a company has to be registered under the auspices of a government agency. It was then that I had doubts on the story being peddled around the internet about how online business could be operated anywhere and from anywhere.

I wanted to retail exercise equipment and, for various reasons, I wanted to sell to the U.S. market. At first I thought I would just register a company in Australia, set up a website and approach suppliers in the States that would drop ship the goods to customers in the U.S.

But there was a big problem with this: U.S. suppliers are loath to deal with overseas retailers. U.S. suppliers want a retailer to have a U.S. EIN or reseller’s licence. Many also want to know your American business bank details. And, perhaps most crucially, suppliers in the States just feel more comfortable dealing with U.S. businesses.”

Many non-U.S. resident entrepreneurs dream of breaking into the American market but find that the technical challenges defeat them. But, not Robert.

His stubborn, Irish genes refused to give in. So, he decided to ‘locate’ his business in the U.S.

“It wasn’t easy. There are some major obstacles for a non-U.S. resident setting up a business in America – and, to set it up remotely, from the other side of the planet!

Forming a U.S. company and getting a tax ID (EIN) proved to be remarkably easy and cheap. But, the real challenge is in obtaining a business bank account and merchant account for your new business.

I spent hours phoning banks in the States and explaining that I was calling them from Australia but wanted a bank account for my American business. Many just didn’t understand and others refused on the grounds of the Patriot Act, whereby a bank has to know its customers and they would only open accounts for U.S. citizens.

Eventually I did find a bank that was willing to open an account and merchant account. Once these were in place, my business was ready to begin operation and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Today, Robert’s online store is thriving. He retails fitness gear to the U.S. market and he does this all from his home in Australia.

“But, what I’ve learned is this: modern technology has indeed made it possible to run virtually any online business from anywhere. Websites can be hosted anywhere, phones and faxes can now be run as virtual PBX’s which means my U.S. customers call my U.S. toll-free number and I can take their calls in Australia. Also, nearly all correspondence is done via email; orders are sent to my suppliers via email, I receive supplier invoices by email and I can access my U.S. bank account online.

However, the actual business entity can’t operate anywhere. It has to be formed and operated in the jurisdiction of the country it was incorporated, which means you will have to deal with that country’s tax and banking laws.

So, if you’re thinking of starting an online business don’t believe everything the ‘gurus’ tell you. A business is still rooted somewhere but, unlike before, you can now run it from anywhere.”

From now on, if I happen to mention “you can work from anywhere”, I’ll be sure to add Robert’s points for clarification. You can find out a lot more on how Robert set up and runs his U.S. business by visiting www.americanbusinesslaunch.com.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2012. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Nevertheless, I’d like to at least mention the tool and give you some of the highlights. First off, you can use parts of the tool for free, so I recommend at least giving it a test drive yourself. You may find that it will give you some optimization tips that you wouldn’t have thought of before, and that alone will be worth the zero dollars you paid for using the free bits of the tool.

Now, if you happen to have people working for you, then you’ll probably love Linkdex. The ability to assign tasks to people via the tool is pretty awesome, and you can correlate those completed tasks to ranking changes as well. Another thing I noticed during my tour (and remembered) was the ability to place a value on various tasks and rankings, so you can see monetarily how things are going. You can read more about the features on the site, but I’ll summarize them a little below.

• Assign tasks for link building, content, and technical issues to team members, and then track how ranking changes correlate to those completed tasks.
• Track rankings, of course, and see how those rankings affect monetary value changes.
• Get lots of backlink analysis and tracking
• Good competitive analysis and tracking
• Page analysis and suggested tips for optimization

There’s lots of summary dashboards that can be set up, with a different set of information available on each dashboard, so different groups of people can quickly see a summary of what they are most interested in. I think what impressed me the most with this feature-rich tool was the ability to assign tasks to people and then match up those tasks with changes in rankings for the pages affected by those completed tasks. It’s hard to describe really, but not hard to understand once you see it in action.

So you know me…if it’s free, I try it. Since Linkdex has the ability to show you some things for free, I recommend you give it a go. See what you think of it. See if it can help you with your own site, or client sites if you have clients. If you try it, let me know what you think of it.

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Each person listed here is someone I know and trust. They each have incredible skills, big hearts, and reasonable prices. If you’re looking for help to make your site better, your traffic grow, your conversions rise, or your site’s emergencies solved, you should consider the people on this list.

Kim Krause Berg

This is who I’d want analyzing all of my sites for usability and user experience issues. Why does usability matter? If you want happy visitors and increased conversions, you want a site that has been optimized for usability. Kim is the goto woman for making that happen at the most reasonable price in the industry. Why Kim? First, she lives and breathes usability, so her knowledge is top notch. Second, she truly cares about what she does, she cares about her clients, and she cares about site visitors. Finally, combine her knowledge and caring with her creative spirit, and you’ve found the perfect usability expert.

Learn more at Kim’s site: Cre8pc

Gail Gardner

Gail, aka GrowMap, is the small business person’s hero, advocate, and champion. I know of no one who puts her heart and soul into helping small businesses more than Gail. So what can a small business hire Gail to do? Gail is an expert in various areas, including blog outreach, writing and/or promoting custom content, local and social optimization, and more. Her rates are insanely reasonable, and you can be sure you’ll get plenty of heart and soul thrown in for free.

More info on Gail’s site: GrowMap

Michael VanDeMar

Keep Michael’s information handy. You’ll want to find it quickly the next time your blog is hacked. What? You think that will never happen? Well, I hope it won’t, but it happens – a lot – to even the most tech-savvy among us. Luckily, Michael has made a name for himself as an expert at cleaning hacked WordPress sites. Michael is very thorough, making sure he completely cleans sites, so they don’t get re-hacked from some backdoor left behind. Like the other experts in my list here, his pricing is extremely reasonable, and you can feel comfortable trusting Michael with your site. His goal is your goal – to get your site back to its pre-hacked glory.

Learn how to clean a site, or hire Michael to do it for you here: Clean Hacked WordPress Sites

Donna Fontenot

Me – Ok, sure, you know of course, that you can hire me for a variety of things. Need an SEO audit? Looking for WordPress help? Social media guidance? You’ll find many of the services I offer on my About page, and on my Hire me page. One thing I’ve been doing lately is being put on retainer for what my clients call their “Dear Donna” requests. Depending upon how often you might need me to help you with urgent but perhaps small problems with your site (maybe you can’t figure out why some text or an image isn’t lining up properly, or you need help with CSS or HTML, etc.), I can be on retainer for you to call upon throughout the month as needed. Typical charges for this service might be $200 for 20 “Dear Donna” emails.

If you’re looking to hire someone to help with something else outside of the services offered by the people on this list, feel free to ask if I know anyone. More than likely, I can recommend someone who can help with whatever site issue you have. I’m sure there are quite a few others I could have included in this list, but many of them are in narrow, specialized areas that may not be needed by a broad spectrum of people. So just because I didn’t include someone doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend them.

Before I end this post, I just want to reiterate that each of these people are people I trust and believe in. Often we are too close to our own sites to really see how they could be improved, or we need an outside creative push. Hiring someone on this list will give you that expert, unbiased help that you need to move to the next level, or solve problems that are just outside of your own areas of expertise.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Still, Larry Kim, the WordStream founder and CTO says,

“We built this free tool to provide advertisers with an easy to digest snapshot of how their ad campaigns are performing and to tutor them on how to make changes that will boost their performance and save money.”

“Easy to digest” sounds like it might be perfect for people like me whose eyes tend to glaze over when looking at all those numbers, but I haven’t had the chance to try the tool yet, so I’m not sure if it’s easy enough for me or not. (It would need to be Kindergarten level, for me, LOL).

I was given the opportunity to try the tool, but my week ended up being far too hectic for me to squeeze in the time. I would have loved to be able to give you my first-hand review of it, but instead, I’ll just have to let you try it for yourself. It’s free, so why not…

Here are some of WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader features:

• Effective use of negative keywords to control spend
• Quality Score for text ads and the keywords targeted
• Click-through rates on ads
• Impression share for ads
• Long-tail keyword optimization
• Text ad optimization
• Landing page optimization
• PPC best practices

Here are a few demo screenshots of a sample account.

Since I dropped the ball on reviewing the tool, if you try it out, let us all know what you think of it, here in the comments. In fact, I’d be happy to let someone do a guest post review on the tool here, if you’re willing. Just let me know, if so.

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Post tags: AdWords, PPC, Wordstream
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Getting Paid: Money Tips for Freelancers

It’s important to get paid – and get paid on time – but it’s often difficult for a freelancer to speak up and ask for payment. By including certain standard phrases on your correspondence with the clients, you stand a better chance of getting paid, on time, without having to nag. Make sure you are both polite and specific on your invoices. Include wording such as:

• “Thank you for your business.”
• “Payment due within 10 days of receipt of this invoice.”
• “Please pay via PayPal to you@YourPaypalAddress.com or send check or money order to [put your mailing address here].”

Always require some sort of payment upfront, and be sure that your agreement / contract with the client is very clear about when additional payments are due. Typically, it’s a good idea to require partial payments as each project milestone is reached and the work to date has been signed off as complete by the client. Many of my own projects are small enough that only two payments are required – usually half up front, and half upon completion of the project.

Decide in advance how you prefer payment, and then document it in a correspondence swipe file*. You might have to be flexible with preferred payment options on occasion, but it’s best to have a firm idea of your preferences ahead of time. I personally hate receiving checks as payment, for example, and would much rather pay the small fees charged by electronic gateways (like PayPal fees, for instance), than to have to wait for a check to arrive in the mail, and then wait to see if it clears. If you have your preferred methods documented already, you can simply copy/paste that blurb into an email with a prospective client without having to rewrite the information each time.

* Note: I am using the term “swipe file” here to loosely mean a series of common sentences and paragraphs that you often have to repeat in various communications – your standard responses to frequently asked questions, etc.

Avoiding Chaos: Organizational Tips for Freelancers

Keep a list handy of people you’ll outsource to if a project requires a skill you lack or just prefer not to do. Speak with them in advance to let them know that they are on your short list for this type of work, so the two of you can come to an agreement on these sorts of arrangements. This will make the process easy and fast when the time comes to pull in help on a project.

Be prepared by having proposal templates, contract templates, NDA agreement templates, and other standard business forms ready to use at a moment’s notice. You don’t want to have to waste time reinventing these wheels over and over again. You’ll want to prepare these documents on your own letterhead in advance.

I recommend creating a letterhead document template in Word or OpenOffice, making sure your logo and contact information automatically populate the header and footer of every page you create. Keeping this as a blank template lets you easily create new documents from that template any time, on the fly.

Likewise, using your letterhead for sample contracts and other frequently needed documents, and saving them as templates, lets you start new documents from those templates any time you need one. This lets you quickly make a few edits based on particular client needs quickly and easily. Learn how to add headers and footers to a document (Word | OpenOffice) and save documents as templates for easy reuse (Word | OpenOffice).

Getting New Clients: Freelance Tips for Spreading the Word

Need more clients? Let people know! Ask your past or current happy clients to refer others to you, and spread the word around your social networks – especially related industry friends – that you have some time to take on new clients. You can even offer a modest referral fee to them for referring people that become active clients.

Attend local community organization meetings and events, or offer to host an educational session at one of their meetings. For example, if you are a virtual assistant, you could hold a 15-minute session at the local chamber of commerce meeting, showing small businesses how to use electronic scheduling tools to coordinate various activities and meetings for all of their employees. By demonstrating your knowledge for free, you are providing a valuable educational service to the local community, giving your local business organization something new to liven up their meetings, and providing yourself with an opportunity to obtain new clients. Of course, I don’t recommend making your session nothing more than a thinly-veiled sales pitch for your services. Instead, it should be focused on helping the audience learn something that they can use and appreciate. Soft-sell your services afterwards by briefly mentioning them at the end of the presentation, and handing out brochures or business cards to anyone interested.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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I hope you don’t mind listening while I admit to this.

As an internet marketer, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve coded. I’ve optimized for search engine traffic. I’ve made sites more usable. I’ve networked and socialized and monitored and analyzed and adjusted and … well, you get the picture. I’ve learned a lot over the years. But not all of that learning has been fun. In fact, some of it has been a royal pain in the patooty.

So today, I decided to confess.

I Hate Dealing With PPC Advertising.

Whew! There, I’ve said it. I’ve gotten that off of my chest and it feels great!

Here’s the thing. I can’t stand running PPC ad campaigns. I can’t tolerate the tedium of the process. People who love PPC would balk at my description of it as tedious. To them, it’s an exciting challenge. To me, it’s a mind-numbing bore, mixed in with a jumble of number crunching that makes me want to scream. I want to throw my laptop through a window when I start looking at the endless reports and numbers and charts and whatever else is thrown into those dashboards. I no more want to analyze how well a thousand ads are doing than I want to swim through a giant pool of hot lava. I really despise the entire process of PPC advertising.

So there you go. I’ve confessed. Don’t hate me for it. Instead, embrace the thought that you don’t have to love every aspect of this thing we call internet marketing. In fact, not only do you not have to love it all, you can choose to let others handle those aspects for you, if those activities are really essential to your success.

I do like being a one-woman business. But I’m not foolish enough to think that I don’t need to call on the help of others from time to time. I don’t have to do it all, and neither do you. I know my limits and I’ll often partner up with those who love doing the things I don’t. What about you? Do you hate some parts of the job you need to do? Do you partner up with anyone who loves what you hate? If not, why not?

Thanks for listening.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Strategic alignment of fractured markets offers significant opportunity to leverage mutual resources for consolidated goals. The consolidated marketplaces will help to drive a single point of contact for your clients, and providers, allowing for significant leverage…

Huh?

I could probably decipher that if I read it a couple of times, but do you really want to force your users to decipher what you do? Unless your business is booking murder mystery dinners, and an invitation to one requires deciphering hidden messages, then you should just speak plainly and leave out all the gobbledygook nonsense-speak.

A couple of years ago, Hubspot in conjunction with David Meerman Scott, created a Gobbledygook Grader tool that checks a block of text that you supply, such as website copy, press releases, brochure copy, etc.) for the use of “gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words”. It’s still a great tool to use, and I recommend trying it now and then to double-check your own content.

UPDATE: Looks like the tool has been taken offline. That makes me frown. It used to be at http://gobbledygook.grader.com

Keep It Simple – Make It Easy To Understand

I’ve touched upon landing pages and utilizing a call to action before, but the one thing all of these ideas have in common is that you should very simply, very plainly, get your message across. Descriptive text, calls to action, landing pages, etc. are all most effective when the resulting message is simple and clear. If you clutter up that message with a lot of jargon and gobbledygook, your prospects will leave in a hurry (and in a confused, foggy state of mind as well).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using jargon, even when you purposely try to avoid doing so. I’m guilty of it myself. In fact, I ran my eBusiness coaching home page through the Gobbledygook Grader tool to see how it would fare. Overall, it did pretty well, but it didn’t get a perfect score. In fact, its Gobbledygook Grade was a 91 out of 100. You can see the full report of my test at http://gobbledygook.grader.com/report/id/2335430/87c43059e991273336eb443b01afff5c. You’ll see that the grader found 3 words on my page that are considered gobbledygook.

I’ll need to work on increasing my score, but in the meantime, I wanted to leave it alone so I could share this with you, and let you see a real-world example. I recommend running some of your web pages through the tool, specifically ones that should be informing your users of something important – landing pages, about pages, product description pages, etc. No matter what kind of grade you receive, the experience will ensure that you look at your content in a different way, and will force you to question whether or not you are making your point, or whether you are merely spouting off a bunch of confusing, jargon-based gobbledygook words.

If you run your page(s) through the tool, consider sharing your grade here with us, and let us know what insights you might have gotten after taking a closer look at your copy.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: David Meerman Scott, Gobbledygook, Grader, HubSpot, Jargon
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Here’s a screenshot of just one small part of the report. You can see that each item is linked, which leads to all the item’s details. Honestly, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I don’t think I need to make this a long blog post. If the information you see below looks like the kind of information you’d want to monitor on your site, go sign up. It’s free for 1 site, limited to checking 500 pages on the site. That’s the option I am using for this site’s report. Looks like I have a lot of broken links to clean up, doesn’t it?

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: broken links, SEO, site monitoring
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Actually, that last item is important. “Entice someone to do something“. In fact, every page on your blog or site should entice someone to do something, regardless of any other purpose that page may serve. Perhaps you want to entice visitors to stay on your site a little longer, or read another post, or check out an offer you have in the sidebar. Whatever goals you have for leading your users to take an action, the path to achieving those goals should be present at all times. In that sense, every page is a landing page, and every page should have been designed with that thought in mind.

There will be times you’ll design one page with the idea of it being a landing page to convert users to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or whatever it is you wish them to do. Those landing pages are usually fairly well thought out, and you may have even used tools or tutorials to help you with your landing page design.

But don’t forget to think about the rest of the pages on your site. Even if your blog posts aren’t selling something, the surrounding template should have some sort of conversion in mind. Make sure you’ve placed your calls to action in the areas that convert best. That may be at the top of your sidebar, or within your header. It may be at the end of each blog post, or after the first paragraph of a post. Whether you use great tools to easily create landing pages, or you run A/B tests to optimize conversions, you have to make sure you don’t limit your conversion optimization to just one or two main landing pages.

Always be thinking about how you can lead a user to take the next action – whatever that might be – and make sure those calls to action exist on every page of your site, because every page is essentially a landing page.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Add This lets me share and bookmark blog posts, web pages, news, photos, videos, etc. quickly and easily to the social services I use the most. There are tons of similar extensions and bookmarklets you could use, but Add This also lets me print and email as well. The interface is clean and easy to use, and for those reasons, it’s my favorite all-in-one social extension.

Clicky Monitor is the accompanying Chrome extension for Clicky Analytics, and the exension is extremely useful. Instead of wasting time and constantly going to a web page to check my stats, I can just quickly glance at the toolbar icon to see how many visitors are currently on my site. If I’m curious to know more, I can just click on the icon to see a stats summary in a nice compact dropdown box. Here are a few screenshots to show you what I mean.

Create Link quickly gives me the HTML code for a link to the page I’m viewing, using the current page title as the anchor text, and placing the link code into my clipboard so I can just paste it wherever I need it. Saves tons of time and tedium if I don’t have to constantly type <a href=”http://…..”>blah blah</a> every time I need to place a link to a page I’m viewing.

Hover Zoom is a very simple extension that I absolutely love. It allows you to hover your mouse over a thumbnail, and the full-sized image will zoom in and immediately show, without loading a new page. Essentially it works sort of like a lightbox, but it works on nearly all sites, whether they use a lightbox or not. This saves me lots of time as I can quickly preview things, and avoid having to load pages unnecessarily. Try it to see what I mean. I bet you’ll love it as much as I do.

LastPass is a password manager and form filler. I’ve used Roboform and KeePass in the past, as well as the built-in managers that come with browsers, but LastPass is my favorite by far. No matter what browser or computer I’m using, LastPass is there to help me quickly log in to whatever site I need access to. It’s my own personal memory bank, and that saves me tons of time! There are lots of features, so I’ll let you check those out, but the security and time-saving access across all my browsers and computers is all that really matters to me.

Now that I’ve saved myself some precious time each day, what extension lets me use some of that time in a relaxed, fun way? That would have to be StumbleUpon. I honestly can’t say that the StumbleUpon toolbar saves anyone any time. Far from it – it’s a great time-waster, but that’s ok. We can’t work, work, work, 24/7 after all. The point of freeing up some time is to allow you to kick back and waste a little of it too, right? Well, that’s the way I look at it anyway, so make sure you have the toolbar handy for those times when you just feel like mindlessly stumbling through the web.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: extensions, Google Chrome
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