Factoring: The Inexpensive Alternative for Financing Your Business
If you own a business – large or small – you need to know about the fast and convenient alternative to business financing or loans from a bank: factoring. Sometimes known as invoice factoring or accounts receivable factoring, this service involves giving any or all of your invoices to a factoring company who purchases your invoices at a small discount, so you receive immediate cash. Many times a factoring company will take on the credit risk of collecting on the invoice.Whether your company is just starting out or you have been in business for a while, you can use factoring as an inexpensive financial tool to relieve cash flow pressure caused by slow paying customers. Instead of waiting weeks or months to be paid for your invoices on products you’ve already delivered or services you’ve already performed, you receive cash in as little as just a few days.Some of the major benefits of factoring include:- No upfront fees – This is not a loan, so there’s nothing to pay back, no monthly payments and no minimum term contracts. Once your cash flow has improved you can stop sending your invoices with no penalty whatsoever.- Fast funding – Unlike a bank that requires a lengthy approval process, factoring services are simple and fast. There are minimal forms to fill out, and many companies will let you know if you qualify in just a few days or even in as little as 24 hours.- Easy credit qualifications – In general, factoring companies don’t rely on personal credit scores, business history or lengthy application periods as with traditional funding. Instead they rely on the credit worthiness of your customer.- Friendly, confidential consulting – Since the factoring company wants to maintain your trust, most companies will work much harder to ensure your account is always serviced promptly and properly. You can always feel free to ask any questions about the process or other services offered at the company.- Purchase new equipment – With the money you receive from your invoices you can do a wide number of things. Unlike a bank loan, you do not have to specify exactly what you will be doing with the funds. One of the things you can do is purchase new updated equipment for your business. This can help you perform services faster or bring in more clientele, thereby increasing your overall ROI.- Purchase inventory/seasonal merchandise – Many retail companies encounter difficulties buying seasonal merchandise in addition to the stock they already have on hand. With the fast cash you receive from your invoices you can purchase more of the big seasonal sellers in your industry and in turn sell more products.- Expand your business ‘Use the cash you receive from your invoices to expand your business and bring in more customers.- Pay off debt or taxes – It happens to nearly every business, large or small. Tax time sneaks up on you and you can’t cover your business taxes, or maybe you just have a lot of debt to pay off. Instead of waiting 30, 60 or 90 days for clients to pay their invoices, you can receive fast cash to pay off bills that are nearing their due date.- Use towards marketing or advertising – You’d be surprised what a little local advertising can do for your company. Bring in more business by using the cash you receive from your invoices for new marketing efforts or advertising campaigns.- Keep as emergency funding – Everybody needs a rainy day fund. Stash some of your fast cash away for emergency funding. Next time one of your company’s vehicles needs repairs or a pipe breaks in your building, you won’t be left floundering.With so many great benefits, it’s essential to be aware of good factoring companies that can help you out with this inexpensive financing alternative when you’re in a pinch.
Beginning Photography Tips – Simple Tips For Better Photos
Here are some tips to make your photo taking better. Most people never bother to take the time to learn a bit about basic photography so the pictures they take are really terrible. The good news is with the advent of digital photography we can now see the result of our picture taking almost instantly. This is really great because we have another chance to take a photo of a once in a lifetime event. Here are some tips that based on my experience will help most beginners out there.Beginning Photography Tips #1 – Buy the right camera for the job
Many people make the mistake of buying the wrong camera for their needs. Consider some basic criteria which will make the decision easier. Are you a point and shoot person? Do you need a camera that takes great pictures out of the box without adjusting anything? Finding a camera that needs little or no adjustment is important if you just want to press the shutter button and nothing else. Also, what size prints do you normally make? If you normally just make 4×6 prints then anything above 4 megapixel will do just fine. Consider the speed of the camera. Do you take pictures at sporting events? If you do, you need a camera that boots up fast and has a very low shutter lag.Beginning Photography Tips #2 – Compose the photo
How many times do we need to see a photo of someone’s face with the top of their head cut off? Really, centering a person’s face in the picture does not a portrait make. Take the time to compose your picture. Off center photos have more interest. If you subject is so small that you need a magnifying glass to pick them out in the scene, you should have zoomed in a little more. You can also experiment with camera angles. Take a picture from above or below the subject for an interesting twist. Use you judgment here because you don’t want to shoot a picture angled down your girlfriend’s mother’s dress!Beginning Photography Tips #3 – Use both hands to stabilize the camera
I can’t stress this enough! Every single time I go to one of our kid’s events, I see some parent waving their camera with one hand and shooting pictures like there’s no tomorrow. Here’s a news flash: those pictures will really be out of focus. It is bad enough having poor indoor lighting; using one hand and shaking the camera makes it ten times worse. Use both hands to keep the camera steady especially if there is not enough light.Beginning Photography Tips #4 – Don’t shoot pictures with the light behind your subject
Yes, everyone does this at one time or another. If your boyfriend is standing in front of the window and you take a photo, all you are going to get is a dark outline. The light source should be behind you, not behind your subject. You can compensate by using the flash fill function of your camera. You get better results if you just make sure the light source is behind you.Well that’s all we have time for. I hope you enjoyed some of my beginning photography tips. For more information and articles relating to photography and digital cameras, please visit out site. Thanks for reading and good luck shooting.
The Impact of Local SEO For A Website
Internet marketing will always be known to cover the global market. Wherever you are, the internet makes it possible for every person from any part of the world to correspond, communicate, and advertise any kind of goods or services for all classes of consumers.The more global a business becomes, the more likely it will gain added profit since there is a virtually unlimited number of potential customers. That is why majority of online businesses are adopting search engine optimization without considering boundaries or limitations based on geography and location.But internet marketing is not just about effectively carrying out business in a global scale. In fact, even search engine marketing has come to affect the local arena. Having an online business means getting the services of SEO in order to get a high rank in Google and Yahoo. Unlike before though, local search engine marketing is getting a share of the popularity.A good example is when a certain website sells wallets, bags, and other designer products, the competition for the same products in the internet may be numbered up to millions. Thus, the competition or supply far exceeds the demand for the said products.With the constant competition in the global scale, some internet marketers are turning their attention to local search engine marketing. There is a big difference in local SEO since you will be targeting page ranking and make sure your website about, i.e. dog tags in Florida is listed at the top of major local search engines.But with local SEO, you get to optimize and improve the page rank of your site based on identifying a specific geographical location. It is basically limiting the coverage or concentration of your niche. With it, competition is lesser but the popularity of the site largely depends on how effective you are in SEO.Local search engine marketing is advertising locally. What you do is limit the coverage and put a boundary on a particular niche. Although there may be millions of pages that contain the same niche, the location filter narrows search results.Anyhow, being successful is search engine optimization still largely depends on the ability of the internet marketing to carry out the usual SEO tasks such as designing and maintaining web pages, creating business profiles that are localized, optimizing web pages through content and links, and lastly, popularizing the whole website.Moreover, keyword research goes the usual way but the main tweak is that you have to put greater emphasis on relevant local content. You have to make sure that meta tags, page titles, and other texts should be unique and distinct to a particular location or area you are optimizing.When it comes to the rate of success, local SEM definitely has an edge over the usual generic SEO most internet marketers target. We can justify this because the number of people venturing towards local SEO is not the great yet so that means competition is still not that strong.
Family Game Night Lite
I have recently seen some television ads about ‘family game night’. These ads suggest that you go out and buy some new board and video games to play with the family once a week on family game night. I see nothing wrong with this idea. I used to love playing board games when I was a kid (which was before the advent of video games by the way). But you should not forget games played with regular playing cards and regular dice, classics that have been played and enjoyed for years. Including some of these in family game night would add variety for little extra cost.When I think back to my childhood, I remember having fun playing the board games and store-bought card games that were popular at the time. But I also fondly remember when my family went camping and we would sit at the picnic table at night playing Cribbage by the light of a kerosene lamp. My wife cherishes the times when she was a girl and she went to her grandmother’s house and played Canasta all afternoon. And when I was in college, I loved playing Hearts and Oh Pshaw with my college friends.How many card games do you remember playing as a child? War, and Memory, and Go Fish, and Crazy Eights. And you may have played Authors and Old Maid using cards specifically printed for those games, but they can both be played using regular playing cards. And you may have played the dice game Shut The Box using a special box with numbered tiles on hinges, but you can substitute playing cards for the tiles. Instead of shutting the box, you flip the cards. And you can play the dice game Yacht, the free version of a similarly-named dice game, using five dice and a readily available score sheet.I think in this day and age of computers and video games, people tend to forget simpler times when playing Hearts could bring a group of people together for an evening of conversation and snacking and fun. It’s sort of ironic that Hearts is a game that most people can find in the Games folder on their computer. You can play against three computer opponents, but you cannot ask “How was your day?” and expect an answer from any of them.Go to a bookstore or library and pick up a book of game rules. Or look on the Internet for ‘Card Game Rules’ or ‘Dice Game Rules’. Brush-up on the rules of a card or dice game that you like but have not played for a long time. Or learn the rules of an unfamiliar game that looks interesting. Then bring the game to family game night.You can even try a ‘family game night lite’ where you lay a couple of decks of cards and a half-dozen dice on the table and play nothing except classic card and dice games. Who knows? Maybe the family will request ‘family game night lite’ once a month.Copyright (c) 2010 – Paul Hoemke. All Rights Reserved.