Rileybiz

By John Riley

Acquiring and managing the financial resources of a company has always been, and will continue to be, the greatest challenge for management. It is even more critical for start-ups and small businesses whose needs are great and their financial assets limited. As a result, when a small company does qualify for financing, it often requires paying higher interest to banks or giving up a bigger slice of company equity to venture capitalists, but if you can’t qualify, factoring may be the solution.

Factoring is one source of funding that is attracting more attention these days. An example is Liquid Capital of Arizona, a major player in the field. They are looking to partner with small businesses without taking equity, sharing in profits or making business decisions. While they are ready to provide working capital to most entities, their focus is on business-to-business companies.

“We offer five basic services to help small business,” says President Joel Gottesman, “ and over time we have found more and more companies wanting to know more about factoring.
Our focus now is to try to provide more information about what we offer and where we think our services can best serve our clients”

Full factoring is one of those services. The way it works is straight forward. All of a business’s approved accounts are sold to Liquid Capital. Then Liquid Capital typically advances 80% in cash up front and the balance as they collect on the acquired accounts’ outstanding invoices, less their discount fee.

Another option is spot factoring. In this scenario, the same services as full factoring are employed except only a portion of the business’s approved accounts, chosen by the client, are sold to the factoring company.

Purchase order finance is another service, but it is different in application. Liquid Capital finances purchase orders for the purchase of presold inventory. Factoring the accounts receivable on delivery of the goods to the manufacturer funds the payment to the manufacturer.

The factoring company can also act as the business’s outsourced accounts receivable department. Their specialists underwrite the customer’s credit, provide collection services, process payments through a lock box, and provide a full on-line reporting system. The cost is very economical compared to staffing a credit department in-house.

Finally, the factoring company provides credit insurance. It is an economical way for a business to help insure selected invoices against loss from a customer’s insolvency.

There are several ways a factoring company can help according to Gottesman, “ We can fund growth opportunities, the sale of a business, delay the need for additional equity, help avoid equity dilution, fund ineligible receivables on a bank line and fund Chapter 11 reorganizations. And the process of helping a client get started is made easy by the experience and customer focused attitude of our people.”

With the many financial problems facing businesses today, factoring can be one of the tools management can fall back on when things are most difficult. It can be the right solution at the worse time.

There has been a major “paradigm shift” in consumer behaviour in the US, with the recession changing people’s views on value.

Deloitte, the consultancy, conducted a survey of 2,077 main household grocery buyers in America, finding that 84% were examining their spending in every category to try and save money.

A further 79% believed they were “smarter” shoppers than two years ago, and 65% said a decrease in overall expenditure had not exerted a negative impact on their quality of life.

Some 81% of the sample agreed it was “fun” to see how much they would be able to reduce bills using vouchers and loyalty cards.

Two-thirds of participants were more regularly reclaiming coupons, a total that includes the 39% using the web to track down special offers.

Around 60% of contributors also described themselves as having become more “price conscious” in the last 24 months.

In contrast, only 15% were “buying to please myself” with a greater degree of frequency, 11% placed a particular emphasis on new products and 7% exhibited stronger levels of attachment to brands.

In all, 75% of the panel suggested the financial crisis had caused them to realise “which brands I really care about are which ones are less important to me.”

Elsewhere, 80% thought own-label goods were simply repackaged variants of better-known alternatives and 74% were “more open” to experimenting with lines manufactured directly by retailers.

Only two or three brands they could not do without

A majority of consumers said there were only two or three brands which they “could not live without”, and that private label items were of the same or superior standard to more established rivals.

Deloitte argued there are now four distinct audiences which have emerged in the US, adding that each of these groups has unique requirements.

The biggest of these was the “spectators”, comprised of young, high-earning and well-educated adults that had no need to reform prior spending habits.

According to the study, this cohort has a “well-balanced, opportunistic take on resourcefulness” which means its members often make savings out of choice rather than necessity.

“Planners” made up 21% of the potential customer base.

The group’s shared preferences include cooking from scratch rather than eating prepared meals, suggesting they are interested in a wide “product mix.”

At the other end of the spectrum are “sacrificers” – making up 22% of the total base – who are typically on a low income and who have seen their wealth decline in the last two years.

While this group displayed a “certain pride” in carefully managing money, this came at a “steep emotional price” in the form of disappointment at being forced to trade down.

One key way people fitting this profile are trimming costs is through opting for larger pack sizes, even though they were the least likely to have children.

“Super-savers”, 21% of grocery buyers as assessed by Deloitte, were characterised by a “deliberate and concerned effort to increase use of coupons and multiple store shopping”.

Women are the most sizeable portion of this demographic, which generally experienced feelings of “empowerment” and “great pleasure” by containing household budgets.

The battle over surplus margins

“We see a fundamentally changed consumer marketplace paradigm, one in which consumers and marketers do battle over surplus margins, where surplus margin is the difference between the regular price and the discounted effective price,” Deloitte added.

From World Advertising Research Center

By Ernie J. Geeting

Every day thousands of people decide to enter the world of internet marketing. They have heard the stories of others earning fortunes online and hope they might be able to get a piece of that pie themselves. Most have no previous background in sales or marketing. Some will succeed but many will fail. In this article I will expose the main reason people fail and then I’ll reveal to you the single most important thing you must do before promoting any product or service online.

Here’s the most important thing you must know about internet marketing…it is all about the MARKETING. Forgive me for stating the obvious but most people really don’t know what marketing really is or what it involves. So what is it exactly? Marketing is the process of promoting a product from a producer or supplier to a prospective customer in a manner that persuades the prospect to buy. It’s about matching products and services with people who want, and will pay for them. The marketing process requires study of the product itself, researching the potential market, testing, presentation, and promotion. Most people who want to make money on the internet know nothing of the process of marketing, fail to do proper research and are unwilling (or too broke) to do testing. It has been said over 95% of people who try doing internet marketing fail. Now you can understand why. You wouldn’t try flying an airplane without proper knowledge and hands-on training but yet hundreds try to start a home business in marketing without having a clue as to what to do. They are destined to crash and burn.

Making money on the internet comes from making sales, nothing more. This is done by advertising. The NUMBER ONE REASON why people fail as internet affiliate marketers is that they have insufficient knowledge and experience in selling and advertising. The cause for their lack of success isn’t the product they represent or the companies they choose to affiliate with, the problem is with the prospective marketers themselves. If you want to succeed online you need to understand the sales process and need to be willing to always be learning sales and copy writing techniques. While there may or may not be such a thing as a ‘born salesman’ (or copywriter) there most certainly are personality differences that allow the concepts of selling to come easier to some than others. However these concepts can be learned and applied by anyone desiring to do so. I urge you to seek out good books and courses about selling and copy writing. This knowledge will be extremely helpful to you when writing the content for your advertisements, capture pages and sales pages. Fortunately, most publishers or network marketing companies will provide you with a professionally written affiliate sales page and advertisements. However….

A frequent temptation newbies fall into is taking the shortcut of using a publisher provided affiliate sales page as the landing point for their visitors. A sales page is the main website page for a product that contains the advertising copy (aka: sales pitch). This is a grave error that will cost them untold wasted hours and advertising dollars. Never link directly to a ‘stock’ sales page. Did you get that? This is an important key to success: DO NOT link directly to an affiliate sales page. Why not? Because that sales page is the exact same sales page that everyone else is using. You offer no more than anyone else advertising the same page so customers have no reason to buy from you over someone else. This is the most important thing you must do before you try to market anything online. Fail to do this and you will sabotage your chance to succeed. The same goes for ads and for the same reason. Never use company provided ads exactly as written, but rather reword or rebuild them while keeping the main points emphasized

So what should you do? Here are some options…

1. Make a Capture Page. On you capture page offer a free report series or e-book about a topic closely related to the product you wish to sell. The idea here is to give away some useful information, not a sales pitch. Deliver it via autoresponder in a series with each installment having a recommendation at the end (with a clickable link) for the customer to purchase the item you wish to sell. That link can be to your company provided sales page (embedded with your affiliate id). This approach works the same way for network marketing. Give first, sell second.

NOTE: Sometimes a product you might sell might be from an online store with multiple products. Always link to the sales or catalog page specifically for that product. If you are promoting a business opportunity such as MLM, link directly to the recruiting presentation page.

2. Build Your Own Sales Page. If you are savvy at website creation you can create your own sales page. Sometimes companies will allow you to copy and paste, or even provide you with images of their product or components of their sales page for the purposes of building your own sales page. Sometimes publishers of digital products will offer a Resale Rights package you can buy that contains all the essential graphics and ad copy for creating your own pages. If you do create your own sales pages reword the advertising copy and somehow personalize your pages so they are ‘branded’ to you. Finally, make sure the finalized page is in compliance with the publisher’s rules for such pages.

3. Create a Review Page. This has become a popular way to promote products. You simply write a review (or do an audio or video review) of the product you are selling from your own perspective and then link that page to your sales page. This can be done as a stand alone website or even a a blog. Just a caution here the FTC is really cracking down on sites like these because of their covert approach. You need to make it clear to the reader that you are an affiliate and will profit from the sale of the products reviewed at your site. Be sure to visit the FTC website for the details and play by the rules. Don’t turn your ‘review’ into a sales pitch. The only reason people will read your review is to get an honest opinion and some further detail about the product. While you want to be careful not to give a detailed description of every facet of the product, you do want to give the reader enough information so they will know whether this is the type of product they are looking for and would like to see the sales page on. By the way, it never hurts to also put a link for your autoresponder capture page on your review site, perhaps you could send them review alerts when you’ve done a new review or listings of other products you’ve reviewed, etc.

4. Use Lead Capture Drop-ins. Drop-ins are nifty little tools that allow you to turn any web page into a capture page. You simply use this tool to create an opt-in form that ‘drops in’ on top of the web page you are promoting. You then link the request form an autoresponder for follow up emails. You can use these much as you would a capture page, offering a free report, ebook or just ‘further information’. These are much faster to create than capture pages and work great with company provided sales pages as they allow you to offer something personally that others aren’t while also helping you build your contact list, just like the gurus do. They are the closest thing to a short-cut.

Having read this article you now know why so many fail online and exactly what you must do to set yourself apart from everyone else. Start putting this information into practice today and you will be positioning yourself for internet marketing success.

Ernie J. Geeting is an internet marketer and writer. He loves helping people to experience more success in their lives. You can see his blog and get a free course with insider secrets to internet marketing success at http://earnonlineincomenow.info

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ernie_J._Geeting

By Vincent Fernando, CFA
FROM BUSINESS INSIDER.COM

U.S. companies are holding record amounts of cash right now…and more interestingly their spending plans have changed dramatically since the beginning of the year.

Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday, June 10, that nonfinancial companies had socked away
$1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier
and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963.
—————-
In a recent survey of company chief financial officers that Dukes’s Mr. Fraham conducted with CFO Magazine, he found that companies expect capital spending to increase 9% over the next year, compared with 1.5% when he asked the question in December. They expect employment to grow by 0.07%, compared with the 1.4% drop they expected six months ago.