Category Archives: Technology

4 Ways of Funding Your Creative Business

Crowd Funding, Small Business Marketing, Technology

Funding Your Creative Startup

Bringing a creative project to life requires hours of hard work, determination and a little luck. Great art often doesn’t require expensive supplies or resources, but sometimes the only thing holding back your creativity is cold, hard cash. Backing any business is tough, but funding your creative business can be a particular challenge. Oftentimes, creative entrepreneurs don’t have examples of successful businesses that share their models. Convincing an investor, bank or friend to gamble on you isn’t easy and the pressure that follows can stunt creative growth.

Luckily, a new wave of support for creative movements is connecting artists to willing investors. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.com, local arts coalitions and other artists are putting money down. If you’re working on a creative project, look to creative funding sources.

Crowdfunding

The Internet is pro-entrepreneurship and pro-arts. The two come together at Kickstarter.com, a crowdfunding platform that enables aspiring entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas on a profile pages, where users can’t donate to causes. Kickstarter is one of many platforms that facilitates crowdfunding. In exchange for donations, businesses offer incentives — it could be a T-shirt, access to a behind-the-scenes blog or any other desirable perk. Crowdfunding received a vote of confidence in 2011 when congress passed a bill that made it easier for small businesses to raise money through crowdfunding, according to Inc.com.

Hundreds of creative entrepreneurs have already made their pitch on crowdfunding platforms. Put your idea out there and see who jumps on board.

Art Grants

You may be eligible for art grants, either through a local arts coalition or the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Nea.gov lists available grants in a number of disciplines, including visual arts, literature, music and design. Users can apply online for funding opportunities. Local governments often offer stipends for artists. Check with your local City of Commerce to find out about how your government supports the arts.

Credit Cards

Whether you’re opening an ice-cream shop or a dance studio, starting a business is taking a risk. In a perfect world, every entrepreneur would have the capital he or she needs to launch a business. Sometimes, though, businesses can’t scratch together the funds. That’s where credit cards come in. Credits cards can give creative entrepreneurs capital to get businesses off the ground, but it’s not without risk. Fail to pay the bill on time, and not only will you get pinned with high interest fees, your credit will take a nose dive. Credit cards have some perks, however. For example, American Express business credit cards offer cash-back bonuses for early payment, travel discounts and other business perks. Credit cards aren’t ideal, but for last-minute office supplies or client dinners, they’re an option.

Debt Loans

The most popular model for start-up funding, debt loans partner banks with business owners in long-term agreements. The two parties negotiate a loan, repayment schedule and late-payment penalties. Bank loans offer start-ups more time to build up a stable revenue than credit cards, but most banks have strict guidelines for loaning money. If you have strong credit and a practical business model, banks will be more likely to bank your start-up.

Author

By Peter Marino the owner of the Digital Marketing Company, reelWebDesign.com based in New York City. Follow me on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

The Easy and Search Friendly Way to
Setup 301 Redirects

HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Technology, Web Design

301 Redirect Using HTAccess fileAs many of you know I recently updated my entire website and in the process I had to setup 301 redirects for the new page names. Why should you do this when updating a site? It’s simple, when someone does a search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! it would yield a blank or 404 error page if there is no 301 redirect implemented.  A 301 redirect basically takes the old URL/page name and redirects it to the new page or URL.  Thus the information a prospective client is searching for will still come up seamlessly   This can mean the difference between a new client and a passerby.  But wait, couldn’t I have created the new pages with the old file names, Yes, I could have but I believe the newer page names I made are contextually more appropriate to the current content and making them more SEO friendly.  Also, I didn’t want to lose all of that old “Google juice” I had built up over the last 5 years, hence, I needed a 301 redirect.  There are many ways to setup 301 redirects but the following way is the easiest and most search engine friendly approach.  However, it should be noted that this  HTAccess approach is for Apache servers only.

Open a simple text file and name it .htaccess (you can not use Word or WordPad it must be a simple text editor with no formatting).

Depending on what you’re trying to do, redirect an entire site to a new domain or just redirect a page it would be as shown below.

Redirecting  a single page

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html
Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yoursite.com/folder/

Redirect an entire site

This way does it with links intact. That is, www.oldsite.com/some/link.html will become www.newsite.com/some/link.html. This is extremely helpful when you are just “moving” a site to a new domain.
Place this on the OLD sites HTAccess file:
Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/

Here is an example of my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reelwebdesign.com$
^/?$ "http\:\/\/reelWebDesign\.com" [R=301,L]

Redirect /web_SMM_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/social-media-marketing-plans.php
Redirect /web_SEO_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/SEO-packages-NYC.php
Redirect /web_design_ny.html http://reelwebdesign.com/contact.html
Redirect /online_public_relations.html http://reelwebdesign.com/press-release-writing.html
Redirect /pay-per-click-management.html http://reelwebdesign.com/PPC-management.html
Redirect /local_SEO_packages.html http://reelwebdesign.com/local-SEO-packages.php
Redirect /web-design-services.php http://reelwebdesign.com/web-design-services.html

Notice the 404 Error Document is telling the browser to go to my 404.html file. This is another handy feature to implement in your .htaccess file.

Happy redirecting!

Social Is the New Measure of Business Success

Pinterest, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology

business success is socialFor the longest time, the goal of most companies has been to make more money than everyone else at the end of the day. Some of America’s most successful corporations are changing this way of thinking about business by choosing to focus not just on profits, but also on the number of people following their company.

Facebook provides a very simple and easy-to-read metric for analyzing just how well people follow these companies in the form of page “Likes.” Granted that it’s taken a very long time for these companies to amass as many followers as they have, their seems to be a clear payout from all their effort. The corporations with the most followers like Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonald’s have continued to be leaders in earnings reports each fiscal quarter.

Corporations that have chosen to ignore the impact of social media have instead found themselves behind where they should be in earnings. Some are even struggling. The benefits of creating a good customer relationship using social media is an undeniable fact in 2012, and it should continue to be just as important in the coming years.

Source: Top Business Degrees

When web hosts fail, what happens to individual web sites?

Hosting, Small Business Marketing, Technology, Web Design,
When Web Hosts Fail: What You Need to Know

When Web Hosts Fail: What You Need to Know

Millions of web site owners found out the hard way on September 10th, when their web sites were down and unavailable for most of the day after an outage of epic proportions hit the well-known domain and web hosting firm GoDaddy. Reuters noted that the wide-ranging outage impacted some of the 10 million users of GoDaddy’s web services, including RunningShoes.com, which said its site was down sporadically during the day. The outage reportedly caused them losses of about $50,000 in sales as potential customers clicked to another site.

Most business owners sink a good amount of budget funds into getting a secure, reliable and fast-loading web presence for their site. And when a server overload, technical snafu or network malfeasance occurs, then web sites do not appear. That’s the unfortunate part of being on the web, when technical issues far away or regionally close can affect website performance and stability. 

So what can business owners do to prevent this type of outage to their sites? Unfortunately, nothing is fail safe in web hosting, but companies should double check the list below to see if they’ve handled the basic parts correctly.

What Type of Hosting is Critical to Your Site?

Your site has specific needs for its operation. If you’re selling clothing materials all day long, you’ll need plenty of web firepower in load times, image renderings and more to keep your site at the top of the search rankings and review sites. Dig around for well-known web hosting companies, but be prepared to shell out significant monthly fees to these web hosts.

Lifehacker offers up some name brand web hosts that might help get you started in your search, or you might want to simply choose a better-priced VPS hosting plan alternative that gives you often as much as the leading web host companies.

Is the Web Host Right for Your Site?

Is your web site a much-trafficked daily news site with lots of video loads and image renderings? Perhaps you’re offering art downloads and need massive amounts of storage for data transfer to your customers. If so, you’ll need a strong web hosting plan with plenty of bandwidth and storage capabilities. Seek out plans that offer gigabytes of storage and good backup possibilities.

Does Your Web Host Offer a Backup Plan for Outages?

Clearly, if GoDaddy can have an internal issue that affects many web site users, then any host firm can suffer an outage. What matters most is how a web host offers a strategy to limit damage or downtime from an outage. That’s the crucial part of a web host company choice. 

Make sure a web hosting company’s claims matches its actual service work. A web host might guarantee 99.9 percent uptime, but that guarantee may be nowhere in the small print of the contract. Check for any compensation to web site owners if the web host doesn’t match its terms of service. A guarantee without compensation is worthless.

Double checking these areas of your own web sites right now can help lead to better web host choices in the future. Always take time to weigh your options and only settle for best services you can find.