Tools

Pay Per Click, simply explained.

A common small-biz rule of thumb is to set aside 10 percent of total expenses for advertising.

Are Scrappy Upstarts really doing this? How do you promote your product, get your company and its great services in the public eye without spending a ton of money?

Pay per click is a familiar and viable option, that you might not totally understand if you’re just starting out.

Pay per click lets you advertise your product or service online and only pay for what brings consumers to your business site. If you put a pay per click ad on the Web and no one clicks on that hyperlink to come to your site and buy your products, you don’t pay for that ad. If they do click, you do pay.

Google AdWords is probably the best known and largest volume pay per click advertising program. It’s also extremely easy to start and it gives you total control of your advertising campaign’s budget.

For its Starter Edition just decide what you are going to say in your AdWords ad (it’s all text), go to the Google site and sign up, write what you want to say in your ad and note the ceiling you will spend each month. Your ad will appear next to the search results of relevant keywords (that you note) when someone searches on Google. You only pay for those who see the ad and click on to your site. And you stop paying when you’ve reached your stated budget for the month.

These ads appear along the side of search related results they can also appear on sites that have agreed to show google ad words, often related to the ad’s content.

While pay per click cannot guarantee results – no advertising can do that – what it can do is guarantee that you won’t spend more than you can afford.

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Bootstrapping Your Business

Great article for Scrappy Upstarts about bootstrapping at YoungEntrepreneur.com

20 Ways To Bootstrap Your Business:

1. Start A Service

2. Figure Out What Makes The Most Money

3. Get Volunteer Help

4. Hire Part Time

5. Automate

6. Form Partnerships

7. Use Pay Per Click

8. Use Search Engine Optimization

9. Leverage The Media

10. Think Big, Start Small

11. Do Something Every Day For Your Business

12. Don’t Quit Your Day Job Until You Can Afford To

13. Turn Everyone Into A Referral Partner

14. Watch Your Payments

15. Start At Home

16. Share Your Office

17. Barter

18. Lease Don’t Buy

19. Hire Friends / Family

20. Create A Rainy Day Fund

YoungEntrepreneur.com

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Free SEO Tools

While full access to SEOmoz.org requires a monthly fee they offer quite a few free resources to help you understand the fundamentals of search optimization. Whether you work with a professional or go it alone - you may find something useful for your scrappy upstart.

SEOmoz free tools include:

• Linkscape - an inlink search engine
• Trifecta - which measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain (Page Strength).
• Term Target - which helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword.
• SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar - Lets you add an SEOmoz tool to your toolbar.
• Term Extractor Tool -  analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.
• Crawl Test - Helps diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website
• GeoTargeting Detection - Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.
• SEO Toolbox - A collection of FREE Tools that will give you quick answers and aid in daily SEO activities.
• Popular Searches- Aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources.

Their free guides skew to beginners and include:

• The Internet Marketing Handbook
• The Web Devloper’s SEO cheat sheet
• The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO (Local Search)
• The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO
• The SEO Industry Survey Results

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SEM in a down economy webinar

The people over at ‘Target Marketing‘ magazine are hosting a webinar entitled 18 Ways to boost your SEM Performance in a down economy. Its January 13 at 2pm EST.

They plan to cover:

• How to increase your ROI even as CPC costs continue to clim
• How to beat your competitors‚ keyword rankings with lower PPC bids
• How to increase your campaign’s conversion rate
• How to save money on testing by utilizing past data

You’ll be able to submit questions directly to their speakers for a live Q&A session during the hour.

Click here to register.

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MyCorporation.com - FREE Inc’s and LLC’s

Starting Monday, Dec. 1 through December 5th [UPDATE: Offer extended until Dec. 31] - MyCorporation.com is offering any Inc or LLC formation FREE. They are waiving their usual $149, but state mandated filing or publication fees and shipping charges will still apply.

Its a great discount - depending on your state you can legally form your business for less than $100.

MyCorporation is an Intuit Company - the same guys who make TurboTax. They cut through the paperwork and details and really make forming your business easy. Remember, the benefits of forming a corporation or LLC can include: protecting assets through liability protection , tax savings, reducing chances of a tax audit, and developing a professional identity with customers.

Use coupon code MYGIFT to get a FREE Inc. or LLC from MyCorporation.com

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Project Management Tools

We spent several months fine tuning the back end to virtual ad agency just to have me start over recently. The back end I’m referring to is the online collaboration and project management area that clients and workers of virtual ad agency see.

In the last 6 months several new project management and online collaborative sites have developed into incredibly robust online apps. Smashing Magazine recently reviewed 15 of the most popular Project Management Tools.

The review includes:

Basic project management apps

Wiki-based project management apps

bFug and ticket tracking, Collaboration

Conferencing

invoicing, and time tracking

Check out the whole article here.

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Make your site iPhone optimized - instantly

Brand new site allows you to make an iPhone version of any web site that has an RSS feed.

Intersquash.com - Has a simple 4 step process: enter the RSS feed of your site, enter the site name, upload a home screen image and place the provided code between the header tags of your website.

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Microsoft launches BizSpark

Microsoft today announced BizSpark , a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage software Startups. Microsoft hopes BizSpark will provide these companies with software, support and visibility. Find out more at the Microsoft Startup Zone.

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Never forget a call or text

For you scrappy upstarts working the phones, Skydeck allows you to keep close track of your calls.

Manage your calls and texts the same way that you manage your email. Check who called yesterday, the last time you spoke, and use notes and tags to remind yourself to follow up.

Freshbooks one of my personal favorite web site as software sites, has integrated skydeck into their invoicing system making it doubly useful.

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