Minimize Outstanding Invoices with an Electronic Invoicing Solution

On average, how long does it take your business to collect payments from your customers? Are you currently waiting to obtain payments for services rendered over one or two months ago? If so, then consider implementing an electronic invoicing solution that allows you to invoice your clients via email and accept payments through credit card, EFT (electronic funds transfer) or ACH (Automated Clearing House) direct deposit.

This method of invoicing your clients via an electronic means, such as email, will save your business time, money and provide a return on your investment. My company integrates electronic invoicing systems for our clients and I can say with experience, it allows you to collect payments in weeks rather than months. It's also much easier for your clients to click a link in an email, fill out some basic credit card information and submit their payment online then it is to print an invoice, write a check and mail it back to you. Your clients will be more inclined to process payments sooner if you provide them with a method that takes one minute to complete.

By doing this, you're also gaining another significant advantage - the next time you invoice your client, you will have their payment information stored on file so you can easily process their credit card or request payment through their bank account (ACH), without having to wait for them to submit the payment. This will tremendously minimize the amount of outstanding invoices, while giving you more cash flow to run and operate your business today.

Some businesses use PayPal to invoice their clients. As this is a very similar means, it's not as professional. If you are using PayPal to invoice your clients, you may be showing that you cannot afford to implement an online invoicing solution; however, if you employ a customized e-invoicing solution, you will prove to your customers that you are successful and are continually working to improve your business - a notion that is very important for customer retention.

If you're currently using PayPal and I just offended you - I apologize. I did not mean you're not on the right track because you most definitely are. People, who use PayPal, are farther ahead of the game than the business that does not accept any form of electronic payment. I'm just trying to open your eyes and let you know that you can implement a customized e-invoicing solution for your business for a minimal cost and with fewer seller fees than PayPal's standard transaction costs.

When it's time to search for a solution that's right for you, be sure to find an e-invoicing solution that is flexible and provides you with the ability to submit and request payment for both one-time product/service invoices as well at recurring. Also, try to find a solution that accepts both credit cards, as well as processes ACH direct deposits because as your company grows, so will the need to use ACH. Also, ACH transaction fees are much cheaper than credit card transaction fees, so this will give you the capability to process ACH transactions whenever possible. Other than that, the additional features and functionality will depend on your specific business needs - so find a solution that is customized for yours.

I hope you find this article to benefit your business. I'm confident that if you implement an electronic invoicing system for your business, you will reap the benefits instantly and will be able to streamline and run your business more efficiently... as I have for mine and my clients.

Move over Froogle - Make room for Google Product Search

Back in 2002, Google launched Froogle, their product search engine. It’s named was created by mixing the terms “frugal” and “Google” together.

Well yesterday, Google announced that they are converting Froogle over to a Google brand and naming it Google Product Search instead. If you go to http://www.froogle.com/, you will now be redirected to www.google.com/products. Why the sudden name change?

"We were a really young company, and I don't think we really understood the burden of a new brand," said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. "I also think it was very hard to build awareness. Our product offering was very robust, but it will fare better with a Google Product Search name."

So it seems like Google is taking a more grown-up approach to their product search and trying to brand their product search under the Google name. I think that’s half of the reason. I truly believe that the major reason for the name change is because Froogle was not doing that well on it’s own. I think it needs the recognition of the Google brand to be noticed more.

The Froogle link was removed from the Google homepage last year. But now you’ll find the Products link under the “more” link. See the image below to see what I’m talking about.

Even though Google has changed the name from Froogle to Google Product Search, users will still submit their products to Google Base as they have done so in the past.

Now it all makes sense! Last year the Froogle product submission feature was suddenly switched to Google Base and then a few months ago, Google required additional required fields when submitting products to Google Base. Now these changes all make sense. They were slowly integrating Froogle over to this new system.

I think this is a great change for Google, as well as all online product companies out there. This should be a golden opportunity to take advantage of. If you’re a product company and you don’t submit your products to Google Base, then I would think about doing this ASAP. The new change should drive more exposure to the Google Product Search engine and will in turn increase sales for all product companies who submit their products to Google Base.

If you’re looking for an automated product solution that connects directly to your database, give this product a try for only $15 / month.

How to list your Products in Froogle (Google Base) the Automated Way

Froogle (now submitted through Google Base) is a price comparison service launched by Google Inc. in 2002. Froogle is different from most other price comparison services in that it neither charges any fees for listings, nor accepts payment for products to show up first. Also, it makes no commission on sales. Any company can submit product information (via a data feed) and be included in the Froogle price comparison engine.

This process is good but can become very tedious so today I would like to discuss a more streamlined way, which you can have your products automatically submitted on a frequent basis. This is the method I would like to discuss and inform you of so you can reap the benefits for your business.

Having your products submitted automatically to Froogle (Google Base) is great for product companies that use a database because the automated process can simply connect to your database everyday and compile a new list of product information. The process will then take this information and format it for insertion into the Froogle system. This automated method will save your business time, money and dramatically increase sales because the automated process will handle the entire process for you.

There are a few automated tools out there that claim to automate the entire process. The only fully automated system Ive seen so far has been developed by Hudson Horizons. Their system is completely web-based, allowing you to easily signup and enter in some basic information. After that, the rest is handled by their team.

Hudson Horizons provides automated product submission to Froogle for only $15 per month. Their product, HH Froogle Manager, provides automated submission of your products to Froogle three times a week. You no longer need to remember to set up the product feed, format the data and upload it to Froogle all on your own.

The HH Froogle Manager offers an extremely simple way to submit your products through database integration.

After you register, you can simply provide them with the information of your product database. A member of their team will then setup the automated process to connect to your database, free of charge, to gather your product information. The submission will then be tested by their team and placed into rotation to be submitted three times a week. You will also receive email notifications of the status of your product feeds every time the process runs.

If at any time you need assistance uploading your products, they are there to help. They offer FREE customer support and once the feeds are setup their job is not done. The will constantly monitor your feeds and make sure the information is successfully being inserted into Froogle three times a week.

So if you have a website that is constantly being updated and utilizes a database then this service can definitely save your business time, money and increase company sales. If thats what youre looking for, then dont let another potential sale pass you by and signup today to have Hudson Horizons automatically submit your products to Froogle (Google Base) three times a week.

Minimize Credit Card Transactions Process ACH Transactions for your Business Instead

What types of payments does your business currently accept? Youre probably saying cash, checks and credit cards " why what else is there? Well have you heard of or though about accepting ACH transactions? If youre wondering what ACH is and how to do it, continue reading this article and you will learn how processing ACH transactions will save your company time, money and simplify your business.

The Automated Clearing House (ACH) is an electronic network for financial transactions. ACH processes large volumes of both credit and debit transactions which are originated in batches. Some of the most popular ACH payments include:

• Direct Deposit of payroll, Social Security and other government benefits, and tax refunds


• Direct Payment of consumer bills such as mortgages, loans, utility bills, insurance premiums, and other forms of online bills


• Business-to-business payments


• e-checks


• e-commerce payments


• Federal, state and local tax payments

Businesses are also increasingly using ACH to collect online payments from their customers, rather than accepting credit or debit cards. Now is the time to think about doing the same for your business. Over the next few years, ACH will become a popular method for businesses to accept payments from customers or make payments to vendors because it is much cheaper than the standard credit card transaction fees.

As an example, lets say youre currently paying 2.5% and 15 cents per transaction to your credit card processing company. If your average ticket cost is $100, you would pay approximately $2.60 per each sale.

Now lets say that youve implemented ACH for your business and you now accept e-checks and/or direct deposits from your customers. On the same $100 ticket item, you would pay anywhere from 20 " 50 cents depending on your ACH processing company. Thats a cost savings of $2.10 per sale!

It gets even better than that " lets say your average transaction was $1000, surprisingly you would still pay the same 20 " 50 cent fee. Thats the beauty of ACH - they do not care how large your transactions are.

You can also easily make payments to your vendors using your ACH solution. Simply add your vendors bank account/routing number, enter the payment amount, submit your batch and whalah your vendor is paid. And its even cheaper and easier then sending a check in the mail!

There are many companies that offer ACH payment solutions but most are manual processes. If youre looking for a fully automated ACH payment solution, Hudson Horizons has can integrate an ACH solution into your website or application in a matter of days. They can have you accepting real-time ACH transactions and saving your company time, money and streamlining your business. Their costs are extremely reasonable and the solution is fully automated. The last I heard, their costs are $15 per month and 39 cents per transaction.

So as you can see, ACH is definitely the way to go. You can potentially save your business hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every single month by integrating an ACH payment solution for your business.

Venture capital investment in Web 2.0 on the rise

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal - Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Venture capitalists continued to favor the innovative activity of Web 2.0 companies, deploying substantial sums in the segment throughout 2006, according to the latest data released by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne.

The global research showed that $844.4 million was directed into 167 deals last year, more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as occurred in 2005.

The research demonstrated a continuing trend that has seen the amount of worldwide venture capital invested into Web 2.0 practically doubling in size every year since 2002. However, most of the growth remains centered in companies based in the U.S. and Europe.

"Web 2.0 is certainly a very fast-growing segment of the overall venture capital market right now. However, based on the median size of Web 2.0 deals and the conservative level of pre-money valuations for these companies, the data does not indicate that we are entering bubble territory," said Stephen Harmston, director of global research for VentureOne. "Rather, what we are seeing is robust investment activity aimed at a still emerging business area."

The median pre-money valuation for a Web 2.0 company in 2006 was $6 million for both U.S.-based companies and worldwide, compared to the $18.5 million overall median pre-money valuation reported for U.S. venture-backed companies and also below the $7 million overall median pre-money valuation for European venture-backed companies.

The median size of a Web 2.0 deal on a global basis was $5 million in 2006, an increase from the $3.3 million median the year before. The median size of a financing round was also $5 million in the U.S. and China, but was higher in Europe last year at $6 million.

VentureOne said it adopted a strict research methodology for categorizing Web 2.0 companies, reviewing them on a case-by-case basis to determine if they meet specific criteria. Companies included in this study have a business model that revolves around a dynamic interface facilitating participation through such methods as user-created content, networking, and collaboration. Applications include podcasting, tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, and wikis.

MSN Live to Support Sitemap 0.90 Protocol - What does this really mean?

Three months ago, Google and Yahoo! announced that they have joined forces to support a unified system of submitting Web pages to their crawlers. Google launched their Google Sitemaps protocol as part of their Webmaster Tools in June 2005 and Yahoo! recently with their Yahoo! Site Explorer.

On the sitemaps.org website, it states that Microsoft is also supporting this new protocol standard but the question that lies yet to be answered is " How is MSN Lives Sitemaps Submission product going to function?

The day the information was released to the public, the General Manager of Live Search, Ken Moss, announced that they are excited to be apart of the Sitemaps protocol standard. Ken Moss states, We are 100% behind this protocol - this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007.

I wonder what type of support Microsoft is thinking of providing. As we all know, Microsoft does everything in their power to not only duplicate what their competition has done but also seeks to jeopardize their competition at the same time. If Microsoft is going to create a Sitemaps submission product, I bet they are going to do it in a way that affects many types of web development and consulting firms that offer creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to Google and Yahoo.

If this happens, I think it will be a bad move for Microsoft. If you look at what Google and Yahoo! have done, theyve created their Sitemaps submission products in a way that allows other web companies to prosper by offering Sitemaps creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to their search engines.

Now Im just speculating here. So until Microsoft either releases information or launches their beta product to the public we really wont know what they are thinking. I just hope when they say collaborate, they know it means to cooperate and not to dominate.

Overstock Merchant Auctions List and Sell your Items

For all of you eBay fanatics out there, Overstock.com has created a very similar website for merchants to sell items through auction-based listings that looks very promising. Lately, Ive become extremely frustrated with all the competition on eBay so I wanted to search for another auction website where I could list my items for sale and not be overwhelmed by 100s of other item listings that are similar to mine.

So I searched in Google and came across Overstocks Merchant Auctions website. At first glance, I thought theirwebsitewas simple to navigate and listed all merchants items by department category for quick and easybrowsing.

Well I wanted to see how easy their listing system was so I signed up as a member and listed one item for sale. My first impression of their auction listing system is very positive. It was easy to use and I was able to list my item for sale on their website in less than 10 minutes and my total listing fee was only 79 cents.

Overstock.com Auctions charges insertion, upgrade (if applicable), reserve price, and closing fees. If an auction closes with a winning bid, the reserve price fee is refunded. Fees are based on a percentage of the selling price. Overstock.com's fees are 60-67% cheaper than their major competitor's.

So if youre looking for another type of auction website to list your items, thats similar to eBay in functionality but has less competition, and is cheaper on your wallet, then I highly recommend Overstocks Merchant Auctions.

For more information on how to sell on Overstock.com Auctions, click here.

About Overstock.com

Overstock.com is an Internet leader for brand names at clearance prices. They help you shop smarter by offering top-quality brand-name merchandise at 40-80% off, every day of the week.At Overstock.com, you'll find a great selection on your favorite brands, all backed by the warranties and service you'd expect.

How can they offer such great deals?

Overstock.com has partnerships with many leading brand-name companies. Because of these relationships, they are able to buy items at significant discounts, which then allow them to pass these incredible savings on to you. Here are a few examples of how we do this:

Overproduced Items
Each year manufacturers estimate how many items they will sell. Many times they overestimate and produce too many items. The manufacturer is forced to liquidate these excess items. Overstock will purchase these items at below-wholesale costs and then pass the savings on to you.

Cancelled Orders
Store managers frequently change the items they sell in their stores. As a result, they often cancel orders they have with manufacturers. The manufacturers are forced to liquidate these excess items. Overstock will purchase these items at below-wholesale costs and then pass the savings on to you.

Company-Specific Issues
A company may be downsizing, moving facilities, or just need to reduce its inventory for any number of reasons. The company is willing to sell the items for less than it normally would (often below its cost) to get rid of the items quickly. Overstock will purchase these items and pass the savings on to you.

MySpace your Business: The Benefits of creating a MySpace Page for your Business

We all know about MySpace and its popularity amongst teens and young adults. We also know that MySpace has been known for its share of ups and downs and both good and bad publicity. But have you stopped to think about the idea of creating a MySpace page for your business? Do you see its potential to help increase your exposure, generate more leads and ultimately produce more sales?

Well in my opinion, MySpace is a great resource for business owners. Ive had success with MySpace and will continue to utilize it for my various business endeavors in the years ahead.

Depending on your type of business, there are some features on MySpace that will be of great value. The following are a few simple ways that MySpace will further enhance your brand, build awareness and acquire more clients for your business:

Company Overview

Use your MySpace page to provide an overview of your company. List your services and explain in detail how you can benefit your target audience. Also, use your logo as your default portfolio image. This way, when people come to your MySpace page it will be the first thing they see. When adding friends, it will also be the image that is displayed on your friends MySpace page. MySpace also allows you to customize your own page with CSS. This will allow you to specify your own corporate colors so you can truly customize the presence of your MySpace page for your business. By doing these ideas, you will instantly begin to build brand awareness to a community of over 100 million registered members and growing.

Pictures

Now depending on your type of business, you will use the picture upload for something that suits yours. For example, if youre a small business you can upload pictures of your employees, add images of coupons for people to download, provide a picture of your office or perhaps a picture of yourself. Whatever pictures you decide to upload, be creative with it. This is just another great way for users to understand who you are and what you have to offer.

Videos

Now this feature is not something that will be used by everyone but if youre smart you will figure out a way to make it benefit your business. Also, MySpace videos can become viral. If someone likes your video or gets a kick out of it, they could pass it along to their friends and so on this could create a viral email of sorts. Maybe you can create a video of your business interviewing your employees and some of your happy clients, maybe you already have a commercial that you can easily upload, or perhaps you just want to find a funny video and add that to your page in an attempt to get the viral chain of events to play out for you. Either way you look at it, videos are just another great medium to provide additional information about your company.

MySpace Blog

MySpace allows you to create your own blog, which can easily be accessed from your MySpace page. It also lists the titles of your most recent blog posts on your page for everyone to see. Your friends can also subscribe to your blog so they will receive a notification the next time your blog is updated. Adding a blog to your MySpace page is a great way to get your content indexed in the search engines and generate more traffic for your business. If someone does a search, for an industry specific topic in Google, your page may popup because of the content thats on your MySpace blog. Creating a blog is also a great way to demonstrate to your audience know that your business is knowledgeable in your industry.

The following are just a few ways that MySpace will help increase your exposure, generate more leads and ultimately produce more sales. I can write 10 more pages about the benefits of MySpace but for the purpose of this article I just want to get you thinking about the benefits of creating a MySpace page for your business.

Whats the most important idea here is not to be on MySpace just because everyone else is doing it. The thought that I really want you to begin and think about is the various ways you can use the Internet to market your business " MySpace is just one of those ways. MySpace is one of my first choices because there are thousands of potential leads already at your fingertips. All you need to do is put your business in front of them.

Well what are you waiting for?

Here are a few examples of companies using MySpace for their business.

www.myspace.com/numberoneartist
www.myspace.com/fox
http://www.myspace.com/hudsonhorizons

Wikiasari - The Future Search Engine to Rival Google

In the past several years, Google and the other major search engine players (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Live, and Ask) literally changed the way we do business and permanently altered our culture for the better. Search has become suchan integral element of today's Internet world and if it was to be sucked away from usat this very moment,I seriously believe the world would stop turning.

Google, todays major search provider, has become such a dominant player in search over the past few years that it seems almost impossible to stop them in their tracks. However, with the birth of a new player, who specializes in community-driven content, there seems to be an upcoming rival between two very popular but different players that could change the way we search for information in the future.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of popular Wikipedia (an online user-driven encyclopedia of sorts), is now in the works of producing a new type of search engine that is predicted to rival Google in 2007. The new Search Wikia, dubbed code word Wikiasari (supposedly not the future name to be used), will be a search engine that will take the algorithmic power of Google and combine it with the editorial community-based input of humans, similar to how Wikipedia operated. This idea is predicted to eliminate a lot of useless information that cannot necessarily be filtered out by a computer algorithm.

Heres Jimmy Wales public statement on the inspiration for and fundamentals of the project:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.

Nutch and Lucene and some other projects now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.

Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.

In my opinion, its a brilliant idea. Will it stop Google in its tracks? Not anytime soon. But will it be a new way for us to search that could potentially change the way we receive more useful information? Yes, I believe so as it makes perfect sense. With the birth and success of user-based communities like MySpace and Friendster and the power of Google and other search engines, it seems like this would be a perfect match - Combining the power of a search algorithm with the editorial input of a human to drive the future of search technology.

I'm excited to watch this potentially new search rival develop. I will be monitoring the Wikiasari project closely to see where this takes us and how this could potentially change the way we search for information in the future.

Froogle Price Comparison with Google SMS - Retail Stores Beware?

In a world where the Internet competes directly with retail stores around the world, its getting more difficult for the everyday mom-and-pop shops to stay in business because of the ever-increasing popularity for people to shop online.

Back in October 2004, Google integrated their Froogle price comparison website with their Google SMS (Short Message Service). As the Internet becomes more popular, especially with the accepted popularity and integration of mobile devices, I feel services thisare something retail stores should be aware of. As people are shopping offline, a user can simply text message Google and receive a quick result of price comparisons from various online outlets back to their mobile device.

For those of you who are not familiar with Google SMS, it is a Short Message Service that enables you to search Google, via a mobile device, and have your results returned as a text message back to you. For all of us who are familiar with text messaging, all you have to do is text message your search query to 466453 ('GOOGLE' on most devices) and Google will text message the results back to your mobile device. For a complete list of the available queries, visit the Google SMS homepage.

For those of you who are not familiar with Froogle, it is Googles price comparison website and allows a user to search for specific products in the Google database to compare prices. The results are generated, listing the various prices and websites where the user can purchase the product from.

Put these two together and you have a way for users to compare prices while they are shopping in your store. Now dont get me wrong, Im not suggesting that this will definitely take business away from you anytime soon, but I am suggesting you should be aware of services like this and realize the importance for you to stay knowledgeable to keep your business competitive in therapidly growing Internet world.

If you have a website and are interested in having your products included in the Froogle database, you must first submit them manually to Google Base. By including your items in Froogle, they will automatically be searchable through their Google SMS - Short Message Service.

If you're looking to automate the submission of your products to Froogle, click here.

Win the Content Race with RSS - Real Simple Syndication

The Internet is a race " a race to see who can acquire the most content on their website or blog in the shortest period of time. Whether its text, images, data or video; the sites who obtain the most content are the ones who will generate the most traffic and ultimately sell for millions of dollars to larger corporation like Yahoo, Google, Fox or Microsoft.

Lets look at MySpace, which sold to Fox a few months ago for 580 million and YouTube, which recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion. How was it possible that these sites were so valuable and sold for that much money? Well, it comes down to many factors but one of the primary reasons is the breadth of content that both of these sites contain. MySpace, an online social networking community, has generated well over 120 million members and YouTube has already grown to serve more than 100 million video views per day and receiving more than 65,000 new video uploads daily " this is why!

Looking at what these two sites have done in such a short period of time is simply amazing and its going to be very difficult for any of us to produce the same results in 20 years that both MySpace and YouTube have done in only a few short ones. Now dont get discouraged because there are still many websites and blogs that are popular, receiving great exposure and valued at well over a million dollars.

As I state in many of my articles, it all comes down to content. These larger companies look for websites or blogs that will generate more exposure for their company. The more content you have on your website or blog the more traffic youre going to receive and the more your website or blog is going to be desired and valued.

Ok, so how do you get to that point?

It truly depends on your business model and how your website or blog is structured but a great way is through RSS. RSS, Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is an XML-based format that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content through the use of data feeds.

RSS makes it easy to take another sites content and feed it directly to yours. As an example, lets say I took Yahoo!s Sports RSS feed and added it to my website. Every time they posted a new sports article or story it would be updated on my site as well, a concept that was a revolutionary breakthrough for the Internet a few short years ago. Now websites can grow their content, at an increasing rate, without having to write the information on their own.

In my opinion, this idea will continue to drive the Internet and will thrive for many years to come. If you want to increase your exposure on the Internet, then you must focus to increase the amount of content thats on your site. If you setup and automated RSS feed to pull data from other sites into yours then you will be increasing your chances on the Internet. By doing this, you can potentially generate thousands or millions of pages in a few short years.

But like I said, it really depends on your business model and how your website or blog is structured. For example, maybe it doesnt make sense to pull other sites data into your site. Maybe it makes more sense to push your data to other sites and increase your exposure that way. If this is the case, then you should be the one setting up RSS feeds so other website owners can pull your data to theirs. There are many ways to organize the type and amount of data youd like to provide as to organize it in a way that will meet your needs for how youd like to distribute the information.

So as you can see the possibilities of RSS are endless. RSS can be used to feed data to or from your website or blog and if setup correctly can increase your exposure on the Internet in a short period of time. If you want to win the race, then you should consider setting up or accepting RSS feeds for your website or blog today.

At Hudson Horizons, we provide website design, development, content management, e-commerce integration, RSS content distribution, search engine optimization, e-marketing services and the development of custom applications such as blogs, newsletter systems, online payment solutions and any other Web application that may be needed to help simplify your business.

Be Creative - Utilize your Website as a Marketing Machine

Last week I received an email from my father and it was link to an online marketing campaign sponsored by ESPN and GMC. The campaign is called Keys to Victory. Its an online contest that allows the website visitor to select the football team, who they think will win, for the upcoming Monday Night NFL game, register online, and be entered to potentially win a brand-new 2007 GMS Sierra pickup truck. I then noticed that ESPN also formed several other contests, in sponsorship with other companies, to help promote their products online " WOW, what a great concept.

What caught my eye about the GMC Keys to Victory campaign is that the contest website is extremely interactive and user-friendly. When you first come to the site, Joe Theismann appears on the screen and starts talking and moving around. He provides a short introduction about the contest and then brings you immediately to the main website where you are presented with various options, such as, hear Theismanns 2 minute trivia, scout some talent, draft a friend, or fire off your pick for the contest.

If you remember, AOL created something very similar a few months back called AOL Gold Rush. This innovative concept that these larger companies are starting to invest millions of dollars in is a great way for them to generate leads while promoting their products online. This idea is becoming more and more popular and many companies are beginning to dream up the next concept to use their website as a marketing machine.

Ok, I know what youre thinking " its much easier for these companies to create and launch a product campaign of this scale because they have millions of dollars to invest in the contests design, development and maintenance. Yes, you are correct and this is 100% true; however, the idea I want to get across is that these companies are effectively using their website as a marketing machine and we should be able to do the same with ours. Im not suggesting you have to go out and create a completely interactive Flash-based contest to promote your products online, which breaks your bank; but what I am suggesting is that your website does not only have to be used for the display of content and information about your company thats boring. Be creative! Utilize your website as a marketing machine and generate that buzz.

Here are a few ideas that may fit into your business:

Recommend or Offer Free Online Tools - Offering your customers with free resources and online tools to help them with their business is a great way to show your customers that you care and want to help them succeed. If you continue to add new tools and resources, your customers will be sure to come back and visit your website time and time again.

Create a company Blog or Community Forum " Educating your users on topics in your industry or providing them with the ability to interact with others on various issues is a great way to create a buzz and keep them coming back.

Create a Contest and offer FREE Products " Like with these other companies, a contest can be a great resource to create a buzz and generate new leads, while promoting your products or services online.

Allow your Customers to create a Profile on your Website " Depending on your business, this may or may not be a viable option for your company. But if you could find a way to make it work, allowing your customers to upload pictures, advertise their company and interact with others for free is another amazing way to generate new leads and keep your existing customers coming back.

As you can see, there are many ways to create a buzz for your business by using your website as a marketing machine. And as youre reading this article, youre probably thinking of some creative and innovative ways that might relate to your business better than the options Ive provided above. If this is the case, great go get started. If youre still struggling on coming up with ideas for your next website marketing campaign, dont worry. I recommend asking some fellow colleagues to help get your started or even better; ask one of your existing customers who you have a close working relationship with. Sometimes customers are the best resource for us business owners considering they are the ones who expect from us and we are naturally the ones who are embedded deep within our business that sometimes we cant see over the fence.

I hope this article has provided you with a few ideas to get the ball rolling and to realize that your website can be used as a marketing machine to help create a buzz for your business. I know none of these solutions are the cure-all but as with anything for your business, you must continually think of the next big idea, the next way to market your business and the next way to increase your sales otherwise,youre in the wrong business.

Be creative! Utilize your website as a marketing machine.

And best of luck to YOU!

Increase Sales and Simplify your Product Business with a Content Management System (CMS)

We will continue to invest in systems, people and product expansion, each of which helps us better serve customers ... For the rest of this year we expect to invest more heavily than we have in the past.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com made this quote back in 1999. We are all familiar with Amazon and its tremendous success over the past several years. Even though Amazon is not as profitable as it would like to be, they definitely did one thing right " and that was to create one of the most recognized online brands in the world.Their website isone of the most well-known and trusted websites to purchase products from on the Internet and every product company would love to replicate what Amazon has done in just 12 years in business.

Looking at the Amazon website - how is it that they are able to sell millions of products while maintaining a website that is user-friendly, easy to navigate and generating millions of dollars a day in online sales? The answer lies in their core back-end applications and advanced content management (CMS) technology. If you really want to get into it, I believe Amazon is more of a technology company than they are a product company because of the number of advanced systems, developers, networks and applications required to run and operate their online business; however, Ill leave the further explanation of this theory for another article.

Now lets go back and review Jeff Bezos quote one more time " We will continue to invest in systems, people and product expansion, each of which helps us better serve customers... So what Mr. Bezos is suggesting is that in order to improve Amazons user experience, they must focus on investing more in technology that will allow them to continually increase the product selection on their website. As owners of our business, we should take this valuable knowledge and experience from Jeff Bezos and apply it to our own product-driven websites. If we want to increase sales, simplify our business, and improve our users experience, we must forever focus on product expansion.

Implementing a content management system for your website will allow you to easily maintain your products as you focus to expand your business online. A CMS will allow one or more administrators of your website to prepare and publish information, without the need to create and manage HTML coding. By using a CMS and focusing on product expansion, you will increase sales, enhance your users experience and minimize resources, while effectively and efficiently managing your product-driven website.

I highly recommend considering some type of CMS to help manage products on your website. If you want to stay competitive and develop a stronger business, you must operate like Amazon and continually invest in systems, people and product expansion - each of which will help you to better serve your online customers.

The Beauty of Drop Shipping Products on the Internet

Having the ability to sell another companys products on the Internet without having to worry about the accounting, inventory, and shipping of the products is a great way to grow an online retail business with minimal resources. This idea that I am referring to is the process of drop shipping.

When you are setup to drop ship another companys products the process is simple - you receive the order from your buyer, relay the order information back to the manufacturer or distributor and they will handle the rest. Once they receive the information from you, they will then process the order and ship it out to your customer for you. All you have to do is get the sale, collect the money and pay the drop shipper your agreed amount for the product.

Now, there are a few ways in which you can to start drop shipping another companys products. For the purpose of this article, Im going to talk about the two most common ways to get you started selling immediately.

The first way is to contact a manufacturer or distributor directly and ask to setup a drop shipping account. Most manufacturers and distributors have special pricing for people who wish to drop ship their products. For example, if you contact a distributor of rocking chairs, you may find a price for one of their products to be around $250 for retail but for people who wish to drop ship, the price may be $200. This means you could sell their rocking chair at $250 and only pay $200 directly to the distributor, hence earning you $50 off the sale of every chair.

The second way is to search the Internet for the lowest price of a certain product on a website and then markup the price at which youll sell the product from there. Lets say you search for a specific type of HP computer and find the lowest price to be on Walmart.com for $1250. Now lets assume their competitors were listing the same HP computer at $1500. This means that you could list the product for lets say $1400, undercut your competition and still profit $150 off the sale of each HP computer. So now when you sell the product, you simply go to Walmart.com and complete the online transaction using your billing information and your buyers shipping information. Wal-Mart will then ship the product directly to your buyer " its that simple!

The best way to market the products is to utilize eBay or create your very own website around these products. I recommend starting with eBay to test the waters on a certain product. Some products you will find to work really well, earning you a nice profit for each sale; yet on the other hand, you will find it harder to sell others. Its a process that will require some testing and analysis on your part.

After you find which items work best, you can develop a website around those products and make the process fully automated. Hudson Horizons can develop a custom e-commerce website that can automate the entire process for you, even the process of contacting and paying the manufacturer or distributor whose products you are selling. If you are a manufacturer or distributor and looking for others to sell your products, through the process of drop shipping, then I also recommend contacting Hudson Horizons. They are experienced at selling and marketing products on the Internet and will even develop a website around the products for free if they find them to sell well.

Drop shipping is a great way to start an online retail business without having to worry about the accounting, inventory and shipping of the products. Even if you have a fulltime job, the process of drop shipping is something that can be done part time on the side. Like I said, since the entire order and shipping process is handled by the drop shipper, all you really need to focus on is getting the sale!

Drop shipping works and could be a great side business for anyone.

Give it a shot!

RSS and the Future of Content Distribution

Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. - David Filo

This quote was made by David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. They created Yahoo! as a way to organize data on the Web that they were interested in. As Google created a search engine to organize information, Yahoo!s goal was to setup their business model in a way that was much different. Instead of having to search for information, users would simply navigate from category to category to locate the information they were interested in; a theory that any person could accept, no matter their breadth of knowledge on the Internet.

Over the past several years, Yahoo! has created one of the most popular sites on the Internet. So what was it thats made them so famous? Was it their Yahoo! brand? Was it the way their site is categorically structured? Both of these definitely helped contribute to their success but what is the main reason why Yahoo! has become so popular? In my opinion it all comes down to content and the amount of information that is on the Yahoo! website. There are literally millions of articles, stories, and other information behind that behemoth of a site. Yes, it took nearly 12 years to get where they are today but my point here is that content is a major key to success on the Internet.

The Birth of RSS

RSS, Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is an XML-based format (using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your website to others. Users can have constantly updated content from websites delivered to them via a news reader (aggregator), a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds.

RSS makes it easy to take another sites content and feed it to yours. As an example, lets say I took Yahoo!s Sports RSS feed and added it to my site. Every time they posted a new sports article or story it would be updated on my site as well, a concept that was a revolutionary breakthrough for the Internet. Now websites can grow their content without having to write all the data on their own. In my opinion, this idea will continue to drive the Internet and will thrive for many years to come.

To view Yahoo! News RSS, click here, youll see what Im talking about.

The big consumer benefit to RSS is that consumers opt-in to obtain content of interest, totally controlling the flow of information they receive. The RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing users to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion.

So lets reverse this whole idea now. Lets say you have a website or blog. Do you provide RSS feeds for the content on your site? Can your users simply take the content that is on your site and feed it to theirs? In a few years, most websites and blogs will have RSS integrated with their website. RSS will become a standard, just as email has become a standard in our lives today. It will be a regular service that is packaged with the development of every website.

The end doesnt stop here. RSS will be used for all types of syndication and content distribution of the future. Email will eventually use RSS and corporations will use it for various communication channels to notify their clients of upcoming specials, discounts, product announcements and technical support issues.

Im excited to see where RSS takes us. Look what email has done for us over the last several years. Email is such an important part of all of our lives " we could not live without it. In my opinion, RSS is just as unique. RSS is going to drive the distribution of content for many years to come, if not forever.

Web-based Systems = A Formula for Success

Does your business have a lot of overhead? Do you feel like your spending too much money in certain areas of your business? If you said no then youre either untruthful or you are not fully aware of the ways in which you can minimize your resources to save money and reduce your companys overhead. The following article explains the positive consequences of implementing a Web-based system to manage and automate certain aspects of your business.

First, let me start off by clarifying something. You do not have to be an online or e-business to effectively utilize a Web-based system. This is something that can be used by any business. Whether you sell shoes online, landscape yards, paint houses or perform accounting services from the luxury of your own home, you can benefit from a Web-based system.Ok, now that I got that off my chest, lets move on to how and why this will benefit you, your employees and ultimately your business. This is a great formula for success.How?One way, is to setup an Intranet that can only be accessed from within your companys internal network. This is usually a solution for a small- or medium-sized business that have 25 or more employees. This will allow each employee to have the rights and privileges to one centralized system and gain access to certain back-end features.Another way, and the best way in my mind for a small business, is to integrate a system into a back-end section of your existing website. This will allow employees of your company to have a login and gain access to certain back-end features that will allow them to manage accounts, view sales reports, send HTML newsletters, manage the content of your website through a Content Management Component and much more.This is a perfect solution because it will allow your business to grow in conjunction with your website. Anytime you want to add a product, you can easily add it through the back-end; anytime you want to send an HTML newsletter, the system will already know your most recent customers who purchased a product or service off your website and include them in your next newsletter campaign.Setting up a Web-based system is important for every business and Im confident that if its setup correctly, you will receive a great return on your investment (ROI).Why?More importantly, lets discuss the reasons why you should implement a Web-based system for your business. The following are the top reasons that motivate me to recommend implementing a Web-based system to every single one of my clients.

1. Centralization " Implementing a Web-based system will provide you and your business with the ability to consolidate all information into one centralized database. By adding all back-end functionality, which is necessary for the daily operations of each employee, you will be collecting and performing tasks for manyareas of your business from one central application.


2. Automation " Lets say you sell products. But more importantly, lets say your customers have to call you or your business to make their purchases over the phone. First of all, this can become quite burdensome and expensive if you receive a high call-volume. In order to handle all those sales, you most likely have representatives standing by taking orders over the phone. Secondly, how do you track your sales? Are you taking these orders by writing them down on paper and then manually entering the data into an Excel spreadsheet or other software application so you can generate your reports? Now lets say you had a Web-based system that allowed your customers to login to the back-end of your website and make the purchases automatically. This would allow you to reduce your employee overhead and at the same time allow you to view updated sales data, at any time, through automated sales reports.


3. Growth " If youre able to centralize your companys data while automating the back-end operations of your business then your business will drastically improve. Providing this type of opportunity can be highly beneficial and will allow your business to grow tenfold. By centralizing your data, you will provide a system to your users that will naturally increase their productivity. At the same time, if youre able to automate certain areas of your business then you will logically reduce your companys overhead.

Increased productivity + Reduced overhead = Growth = The Formulafor Success

5 Surefire Ways to Increase Online Product Sales

So you have an online business and your selling products off your website. Lets say youre making sales but youre not making as many as you would like. The following outlines a few surefire ways to help increasethe sales of your products off your website.

Considering Hudson Horizons has many product clients, I have a lot of experience working with them to help increase their sales online. The information Im providing below is the same that Id share with them if I was to help increase their sales.

Please understand, these are not quick fixes " you must dedicate yourself and your company to implement these changes in order to see positive results. Some changes suggest shifts in the way you perceive your customers and others are software implementation tactics that can provide an immediate return on your investment.

Try some or all of these ideas to increase online product sales.

Setup a Coupon Discount Program for Repeat Customers

Your repeat customers should be your pride and joy. If you have customers that continually come back to purchase from your website, then you should provide them with coupon discounts to thank them for being a loyal customer. This will make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside and they will greatly appreciate you recognizing them as a valuable customer.

A common coupon code is one that offers them a 10% - 20% discount off their next order. Setting up a Coupon Discount Program requires some modifications to your website. I also recommend setting up a system that will automatically send the coupon code by email along with their order receipt. The email could say something like this " Thank you for your recent purchase. Weve noticed you have purchased from our site before. To show our thanks for being a repeat customer we want to offer you with the following coupon code for your next order. Simply enter the coupon code 15OffOrder when checking out on your next order from our website and you will receive 15% your total order price.

A Web development company, such as Hudson Horizons, will be able to help you implement a Coupon Discount Program for your website.

Offer Free Shipping for all Orders over X Amount

A great way to increase sales is to offer free shipping for all orders over X amount. The way to do this is to first determine the average sales price of an online order. Lets say the average order price is $50, for two products, and shipping is approximately $10. That means your total order is $60. A great way to entice people to increase their order is to offer them free shipping for all orders over lets say $75. That means all they have to do is purchase one additional product. If you do this, you will increase the total sales of each order by $15. Of course the margin on each product is different so you need to determine your breakeven point and go from there. The above was merely an example to help explain the idea of offering free shipping to your customers to increase your sales.

Offer Free Samples with Each Packaged Order

Why do so many businesses include free samples of other products when you buy something from them? Because it can increase sales in so many ways. As the customer who bought the original product, I might try and like the sample of the new product and buy some of that too. Or I might pass on the sample to someone else who might try the product, like it, and buy that and other products from your companys website. At the very least, the original customer will be thinking warm thoughts about your company and hopefully telling other people about your products.

Offer free samples with each packaged order. It will be a small price to pay to make your clients happyand keep them coming back.

Customers who Bought this Items also Bought

A great way to up-sell products is to let your customers know about them. Amazon.com does this to perfection. When browsing and making a purchase off Amazons website, you will notice, underneath the product, an area that says Customers who bought this item also bought. This is a great way to let you customers know about other products that are similar and were interesting to your other customers. By doing this, you offer the opportunity to up-sell some products that maybe your customer did not see or were not thinking about when they were browsing your site.

Adding this up-selling feature will require modifications to your website. A Web development company, such asHudson Horizons will be able to help implement up-selling features like this to your website.

Setup an Online Customer Rewards Program

We are all familiar with the customer rewards programs that so many large corporations have in place and theres no reason why our smaller businesses cant have one as well. It can be as simple as a discount on a customers birthday or as complex as a points system that earns various rewards for discounts on online merchandise.

If setup correctly, the above information will provide some surefire ways to improve customer loyalty, build customer satisfaction and increase online product sales.

I hope you find this information to helpful and vital to the success of your e-business.

China - Building a Better Internet

The Internet is changing ever so fast. Every second theres hundreds of new websites being born throughout the world. People and companies are growing their Internet-based businesses faster than every before. Our lives have become completely morphed by the software and websites that allow us to communicate with users across the globe. According to recent statistics from blog-tracking site Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled every six months for the last three years. That's 175,000 new blogs per day worldwide.

Ok, so you get it, the Internet is expanding and its expanding fast. Well how about the idea of a new Internet? An Internet thats more secure and five times the speed of the current Internet we use today. Is this possible? How could the Internet be replaced by another version of the Internet? If youre saying, that doesnt make sense " think again.

In research labs throughout China, engineers are busy working on another project that the Chinese government plans to reveal at the 2008 Summer Olympics - China's Next Generation Internet (CNGI), a faster, more secure, more mobile version of the current one. If this becomes a reality, which supposedly is already well into the development phase, CNGI's impact will be felt for decades.

CNGI is the focus of China's plan to steal leadership away from the United States in all things Internet and information technology related. Their strategy, as outlined in their five year plan, states their plan to move away from the idea of manufacturing and more towards technological innovations and breakthroughs. They want to compete with the US on a level that has been dominated by the US for many years. "CNGI is the culmination of this revolutionary plan" to turn China into the world's innovation capital, says Wu Hequan, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the chairman of the CNGI Expert Committee, the group overseeing the project. "We will use it as a way to break through and be competitive in the global economic market."

The technology, at the heart of CNGI, is an emerging communication standard called Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6). The current 30-year-old standard, IPv4 (IPv5 had issues and never made it as a successful version), doesn't have enough unique IP addresses for every possible user in the world to connect to the Internet. IPv6 solves this problem, and is more secure and efficient than its forerunning version. For these and other reasons, most experts agree that a shift to an IPv6-based Internet is inevitable.

Whats the reason for China to develop another version of the Internet?

Well if we look at the history of our Internet, we started off using an addressing system, IPv4. The addressing scheme uses a series of four decimal values, each of which can be a number from 0 to 255 (also known as 32-bit addressing). This provided us with a total of 4.3 billion possible addresses. In 1976, when computer engineers Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn developed IPv4, that seemed like plenty. "A longer address sounded just a little excessive in 1976," Cerf said at a government roundtable in 2004. "I mean, after all, the Internet was an experiment. So I thought, well, 4.3 billion addresses should be enough for an experiment."

Considering the Internet is primarily a US stronghold, over the years we have put a hold on more than 30% of all IP addresses and were continuing to do so at an increasing rate. So where does this leave China and other countries just trying to take a stake in the Internet? It leaves them with not much of an option. If these countries want to take control and become a dominant player in the Internet, then they must create another means " hence, the reason why China is creating IPv6. This new version of IP addressing, will solve the problem of running out of IP addresses. This new version will quadruple the number of decimal values from 4 to 16. This will result in nearly an infinite number of possibilities. This means that every person on this earth will be able to have 50 octillion IP addresses.

So where does this leave the US?

In my opinion, Im very concerned about our future. Why? Well because we are currently doing nothing about working toward the adoption of IPv6 for our own purposes. This means that in a few years we will have to play catch-up to China. At that time it will be too late. If we begin to convert now, we can sustain the costs over the next few years. However, if we wait, it will be extremely costly for businesses to convert all at once. This means we will take a big hit - a big hit to our economy and a big hit to our dominance in technological innovation.

Ok, so now we understand the importance of the next Internet but what does this mean for China? Well in the near future, China plans to show the rest of the world just how advanced its Internet is at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. CNGI will control the facilities " everything from security cameras, lighting, thermostats, taxi cabs, computers and video monitors that will be used during the Olympics will have their own unique IP address. This means that they will have the ability to navigate their taxi cabs through highly trafficked areas, stream video to any monitor at any second and monitor their security cameras from any location. In the future, this means that China has the possibility to ultimately control the Internet, as the US does today. This will put a huge hole in the US economy. A very large percentage of our economy is being controlled by the Internet " this is a very serious problem and we must act now.

IPv6 has a very promising future and will probably be the next Internet that we will use for many years to come. The problem is we are not doing much about upgrading our existing Internet and hardware infrastructure. The US Department of Commerce and the Government say they are aware of the issue. Then why havent we heard anything yet about out plans to convert to IPv6? I think we must begin planning now and act as soon as possible. We are the United States of American, one of the strongest countries on earth but as time moves on, we are gaining more competition from other countries. We must begin to take control and compete on a much larger, more global scale.

We must not wait any longer. The time is now!

Skype - How it will benefit your Business

How much are you spending on your landline phone charges every month? Are you paying more than youd like to?

Well if you have a home-based or a small business, then Skype might be an excellent way to greatly minimize your monthly phone costs.

Never heard of Skype before? Well Skype is a software that lets you make free phone calls over your computer to anyone else with a Skype account, anywhere in the world. All you need is a computer and microphone and your normal computer speakers to act as your telephone. And if the other person does not have Skype, thats not a problem, you will pay an extremely small per minute fee to call outside of your country. Currently all phone calls to landlines and cell phones within the US and Canada are 100% free at least until the end of this year.

Skype is available in 27 languages and is used in almost every country around the world. Skype generates revenue through its premium offerings such as making and receiving calls to and from landline and mobile phones, as well as voicemail and call forwarding. Skype, based in Luxembourg, has relationships with a growing network of hardware and software providers and is an eBay company (NASDAQ: EBAY).

In order to use Skype, all you need to do is download the software to your computer and complete a simple setup process. You can call anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world for free. And youll always be able to do that. Not only can you use Skype to make phone calls but you can also use Skype to Instant Message your friends and business contacts.There are some other useful things you can do on Skype that arent free (but theyre pretty cheap, actually).

SkypeIn " This is a cool feature that lets you receive your own special telephone number to be able to receive phone calls directly to your Skype account. When you enable this feature, your business contacts can call your number and your Skype program will ring directly on your computer. With a simple click of the mouse, you can answer the call and talk directly over your microphone and computer speakers. The quality on Skype is excellent. Also, if you do a lot of business, in lets say New York, then you can get a local NY telephone number so your clients do no incur long distance charges. A SkypIn telephone number is only $39 per year.

SkypeOut - You can call any telephone number in the U.S. and Canada for free. And Skype has very reasonable charges for calls made to non-Skype phones in foreign countries through SkypeOut. International per-minute charges vary by country, but they start at under 2 cents. For a complete list of international rates, click here.

SkypeVoicemail " If you are not around when someone call on Skype, then this feature will allow your account to receive and store voice-mail messages. You can check your messages when you return to the office. This feature is free when you purchase a SkypeIn number for $39 or can be purchased separately for an annual cost of $19.

You can also your Skype account from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Last week I was in the Dominican Republic on business and went to the Internet lab to check my email. I noticed they had Skype downloaded on their lab computers, so I simply logged into my Skype account and called my business partner at our office in New Jersey. For a 20 minute call to the US, it cost me less than $2 that is unheard of.

I think Skype is great. Check it out for yourself.

US Unemployment Rates Down in August

Housing prices have leveled in the majority of the US and the Fed, worried about an economic slowdown, leaves rates unchanged. These are legitimate red flags for us business owners to be concerned about the expectations of the economy and the future of our businesses. Should we hire or should we minimize some of our resources to prepare our companies for a near future economic slip?

Well, according to an article on ABC News - A hiring revival pulled the nation's unemployment rate down to 4.7 percent in August and flashed a Labor Day weekend message that the slowing economy isn't in danger of fizzling out.

The latest snapshot, released by the Labor Department on Friday, was a bit brighter than expected and eased some fears that the economy weighed down by a housing slump might tip into recession.

"This provides some peace of mind," said Oscar Gonzalez, economist at John Hancock Financial Services.

Employers boosted payrolls by 128,000 in August, an improvement over the 121,000 jobs created in July. Schools, hospitals, financial firms, computer-design shops and construction companies were among those posting employment gains last month. That helped to blunt job cuts in manufacturing, retailing, trucking and elsewhere.

On Wall Street, the employment news lifted stocks. The Dow Jones industrials gained 83 points to close at 11,464.15.

With hiring improving, the unemployment rate dropped down a notch from a five-month high of 4.8 percent in July. That decline put the current unemployment rate close to a five-year low of 4.6 percent reached in May and maintained in June.

So for us small business owners the economy is holding and this looks promising for us as we approach the fall and holiday seasons in the upcoming months.