South Africa is the Ticket to Africa for Your Business

South Africa is an emerging business hub for the whole of Africa. The stronger economy in the region brings big opportunities, not just for the locals abut also for the foreign investors to think big about Africa and South Africa is the place to enter into the African region.

Starting your business right from South Africa is probably the wisest of all decisions. Check out the most popular small business ideas for South Africa, and see how you can develop then big enough so that the whole African region has demand for your product/service!

What makes South Africa the best place to start business is:

• Good quality of education
• Adequate infrastructure to support business growth
•  Dual-logic economy where big and small business work in a constructive partnership with one another
• Competitive personal and company tax rates
•  Social harmony among citizens
•   And of course an effective government

 All these ingredients of small business success are though present in other African countries as well, but no economy has them all. So start with South Africa and expand wherever you want to.

Related Reading: Know the Purchasing Power of South African Consumers for Better Business

UAE Free Zones: Do Consider All the Aspects Before Registering

FRee zones in the UAE where they are great way for foreign investors to boost their business are also subjected to some limitations, so do not register your company in a UAE Free Zone without taking a look at the available office sizes, the limitations and other preconditions.

I did write that you should opt for free zone in the UAE for 100% ownership, however, requirements may vary business to business; for instance you may need a bigger space for operation that is not available in the free zone or else, you may not be able to target the right audience due to the free zone limitations.

Here is a list of best small business ideas for UAE; so, I am sure, you may want to proceed with any one of them. For any business idea to work great in the UAE, other than investment and marketing, abiding by the rules is of utmost importance, so a right choice of free zone matters most.

Most of the time, the published information for a Free Zone gives a wide choice of offices, but the actual availability may vary.

The requirements, limitations and the rules of each free zone are different, so a better idea is to study all of them closely before getting the registration done.

Converting Your Annual Salary into Monthly with a Consulting Business

Thousands of businesses are incorporated on daily basis, and not every entrepreneur is jack of all! This is where small businesses do need various consultants, let it be a marketing consultant, growthhacker, social media consultant or a business development expert.

Well, it’s not just the small business that needs consultants on regular basis, but large enterprises also seek consultant’s help in many cases, i.e. when their departments are under performing or when they find hiring a consultant cost effective!

So guys, consultancy business is hot today and will be the same tomorrow! So, if you know your subject matter well and are working on some 9 to 5 job, starting your own consultancy business will certainly be exciting.

Get to know how to start consulting business, and don’t worry about things like, oh… I don’t know this and I don’t know that!...... Being a consultant you are nothing less, nothing more; just a consultant!

To make your consultancy business set up easier, here are few must read articles:

• ·         Starting A Consulting Business? 15 Things To Do Right Now
• ·         5 Critical Decisions To Make Before Starting Your Consulting Business
• ·         Considering a career in consulting? Avoid these 5 stupid mistakes

Understanding the Importance of Quality Content in Small Business SEO

As a small business owner, one must know the SEO basics, so while outsourcing the work, you can measure the results effectively.

In this connection, you must know the importance of quality content for small business SEO. You ought to understand the fact that producing high-quality content is the essence of SEO, let it be for awareness purpose or for lead generation and sales.

While creating pages, keep the end users in mind; serve them with the best quality content and do not trick the search engines to get traffic alone. A traffic that you receive with tricks is of no use.

When a user searches for something and seeing your result when he lands on your page, he will be a mere load on server if he doesn't take the desired action. And, he won't take any action, if this is not what he was looking for.

Check out these 32 SEO tips for small businesses by eConsultancy.
Search standards are constantly evolving, but with great content you can always stay stable, as it doesn't just help in search engines, but also makes your visitors loyal!

When Should I Leave My Job to Start My Own Business

Many wannabe entrepreneurs cannot make their dream come true just because they cannot take the risk of leaving job and starting a business right away. Well, that's understandable; your job being the only source of income can be a big hurdle on the way to set up your own concern.

Here I will discuss the steps with which an on job executive can make a smooth transition from job to business.

Here it goes:

1. Define the Business Model: Determine what you’d like to do and also think about what others will pay for. To do this, you can take ideas from 2015 small business ideas and also by interviewing ideal customers.
2. Plan Things Out: Once the business idea and revenue models are finalized, now it's the time to develop your marketing and business plans.
3. Launch Beta: Since you are still on job, it's good to launch Beta version of your business with limited operations that you can easily manage along with job. While staying in the Beta, assess feedback and adjust things accordingly.
4. Get a Team Onboard.
5. Generate funding to start the operations.
6. Set up the structure of your company.
7. Leave your job.

Becoming an entrepreneur requires a lot of work before you even consider quitting your day job, and people with single source of income should never jump into business without a smooth transition as mentioned above.

How Much Space is Needed for a Laundry Business?

Whether you are starting a hoe based laundry business or want to rent a shop for the purpose, it's essential to know how much space you will need to start the operations.

So, to know how much space is exactly needed, first determine the services you wish to offer, and how many people will be working in the laundry. Knowing the two basic factors you can calculate the required space easily.

It's important to mention in your laundry business plan about the process with which you will carry out the operations, because investors at times may want to look the insights of the business.

Here's a quick list of items to consider in order to determine the required space.

• Services you will offer.
• How many employees you are likely to have at any one time, and how much space they will require.
• Where will the clothing bundles be stored?
• What are the sizes of machines?
• Will you offer a waiting area for customers?
• Where will you conduct the management of the business; the space you will manage the books and overall management? 

 
And yes do not forget to consider potential for future growth.

Setting Up Operational Hours for a Salon Business

Let it be the hair salon startup or you have spent a couple of years in operation, the key to success is to accommodate the maximum number of clients during the business day.

So, you must consider your hours of operation carefully. To do this, you need to do sufficient research on the location, i.e. if it's a residential area or a commercial one and when most of the people are active.

By now, you must already know that the beauty business isn't a 9-to-5 kind of industry, at times it's 9 to 9 and in other cases it may be 9 to midnight.

Many salons are also open seven days a week and on some of the traditional holidays as well. In some cases they also extended their hours during wedding season.

It's important to know all these facts and duly note it down in you hair salon business plan, so when you start operations, you should be on the right track.

Most of the couples are both working and are busy raising a family while meeting the career goals. To manage their personal and professional lives, they need some space and being into beauty business, it's your duty to provide them with maximum comfort.

Optimizing Forms on the Landing Page

The form on the landing page is the one big element that defines the success or the failure of your landing page. It will be the busiest part on the page if it's a success else they will ignore it.

Most of the times when marketers/webmasters follow all the landing page optimization best practices, but keep a lengthy and untidy form on the page, the whole effort is wasted.

Here I am going to list some simple tips to optimize the forms on your landing page, and reduce your bounce rate.

1. Remove unnecessary fields; most of the time, don't ask the age of their child where you need name and contact information only.
2. If you really need a detailed information, distribute it into multiple forms, whereby you can present them and advanced level when they are done with the basic.
3. Donʼt crowd your form, make it inviting, clean and simple by surrounding it with a decent margin of clear space. 
4. Use oversized shiny buttons that really stand out.
5. Use a large enough font that anyone can read it easily. 
6. Make your forms feel friendlier and happier.
7. Mention the benefits and rewards very clearly and position them in context with the form so that people are constantly reminded why they are bothering.

I hope the above tips will help you to optimize your forms on landing pages and make your visitors feel comfortable on the site!

How to Add Credibility to Your Website Copy

Credible website content is the only way to develop and enhance your visitors' trust in you. So, it's very important that your sales copy contains credibility feature.

Remember that this alone will not help increasing sales, rather you should have a long term and effective website conversion optimization strategy that contains special instructions for credible content development and management.

Coming back to the topic; this is the credible website content only that makes visitor trust you and feel comfortable enough to buy from you.

Whatever the content strategy you have, make sure it contains space for the following points:

1. The best and the easiest way to establish your credibility is to include customer testimonials in your sales letter. 
2. Make sure that you include real and verifiable testimonials.
3. Add excerpts from genuine e-mails, letters and social media responses from customers expressing how your product or service helped solve the particular problem they faced. 
4. If it's a services business, adding a section to your copy that outlines your credentials, experience and any background information that makes you qualified to solve your target audience's problem is a great way to build credibility.
5.  Your aim should be to effectively convince readers that you are the best person to offer them a solution to their problem.

There can be several more options, depending upon the business, so look for the same and revamp your copy and test it against what you're using now. You'll be surprised by the results for sure!

Diversifying Your Business Can Let it Grow Faster

As I explored the options for a fast track business growth, this attracted lot of my attention. Most of the time we think about franchising and similar options in priority and do not think of small scale and cost effective options.

So, if you are looking for answers like how to grow a small business faster; diversifying your business can be excellent growth strategy by having multiple streams of income. Some can be seasonal while others can work evergreen!

The word diversifying speaks all about it, however, I feel it necessary to discuss what can be done with regard to use diversifying as business growth option.

Here are some ideas:

1.     Sell complementary products or services
2.     Teach how to figure out the solutions of most common problems your customers are facing.
3.     Export your products to a new region.
4.     Get others' products on board that doesn't hurt your products
5.     Become a paid speaker
6.    Write for leading publishing houses
7.    Be a guest in a TV show

Well, ideas can be unlimited; all you need to do is to think out of the box and see what complements your business.

Starting a Bakery? Wait; Do You Have a Business Plan?

Even if you want bakery business to be a hobby or part time, a business plan is a must. No hobby is pleasant if it brings you loss.

Now if your home based bakery is going to be your full time business and or you intend to grow it bigger in future, a business plan is a must again, after all you are going to make loving out of it.

So, starting with a business plan is the step 1, followed by more of execution processes.
Here’s what a good business plan should be comprised of.

1. Executive Summary (including Mission & Keys to Success)
2. Company Summary
3. Products
4. Market Analysis Summary
5. Strategy and Implementation Summary
6. Management Summary
7. Financial Plan
8. Appendix

Although you can create a workable bakery business plan yourself, getting help from an expert is always a great idea. There are lot of free tools as well, which can help you write a good business plan in less time, like bPlans.com. Do check multiple alternatives before finalizing the tool, but make sure you get your business plan ready before anything else.

10 Important Questions A Beauty Salon Business Plan Should Answer

The most difficult part of writing business plan for your beauty salon is when you are stuck with information bombs. You have so much information around and you are not sure what to include and what not.

Having no clue of what a beauty salon business plan should contain; you cannot prepare a good document. So a quick idea is to filter top 10 questions that your business plan must include.

Here's the list of those top 10 questions:

1. What business are you in?
2. How will your beauty salon make money?
3. What does the salon need to get started?
4. What is the operating budget?
5. Who are the target customers of the salon?
6. How will you reach those customers?
7. What makes the salon different from the competition?
8. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
9. What are the biggest challenges salon needs to meet in order to be successful?
10. How will you measure success?

Once, you answer all the above questions in a document, your beauty salon business plan is ready. Yes, to make the document look more professional, get a free template and fill out the information.

Improve Website Navigation to Increase Sales

Increasing sales doesn't always mean to increase website traffic. Most of the time, just converting the existing visitors into customers work much better. That's what we call conversion optimization.

So, if you are looking for help on how to increase sales through Online Marketing, start working on converting existing visitors.

It starts with working on your website fixing. Know that fact that, to encourage site visitors to purchase from your website it needs to be very well laid-out, clean and clear. That is what we call Navigation.

If people find your website navigation not useful, and they can't find what they want, they will go and find it elsewhere and they won't come back.

The best navigation option is to keep everything simple, professional and consistent. No spelling errors, proper categorization and of course a strong call to action. Minimize the number of clicks from landing till the checkout; the whole purchasing process must be quick affair.

Fix your website navigation and see how it works to convert more of visitors.