You’ve Incorporated Your Business – Now What

You’ve just incorporated your new business and you’re wondering what to do next. Not that you don’t know a couple hundred things that need to be done but let me add four items to your “to-do” list that you might not be thinking about.

1. Visit IRS.gov and figure out what you’ll need to do to stay in compliance with tax law for your new business. You may need to pay estimated tax quarterly or have some other requirements you’ll need to comply with. Better to stay on top of all things to do with taxes and not get caught by it later.

2. Visit your official state government website to learn what they require of your new business.

3. If you’re planning on applying for the subchapter s designation for your new business you should check the IRS.gov site to see when the deadline is for filing. In the past it’s been the first quarter of the year following the date you incorporated. They are slightly lenient and might give you extra time – so if you’re late – file anyway.

4. Grab your domain name to match your business and, if it’s too long maybe a more user-friendly version also. If you use Godaddy.com you can get domain names for about $10 each. 1 year of hosting for just $50. You should register your domain name as soon as possible as there are some unscrupulous people that comb the state registry for new businesses and pre-register domains that match the incorporated site.

Take care of these few things before you get busy with the myriad tasks in front of you. Good luck with your new business – and if you need any internet training we’ll have a number of free and premium courses here to get you up to speed.

3 Things You Must Do Daily Online for Your New Business

There are probably 600 things you could do today for your business. How do you choose which are the most important? Well, though it varies by day these are some activities you really should do daily without fail.

1. Read and reply to email. This is the first thing we do every day for a couple of reasons. We want to know if there are any problems we can sort out immediately that might lead to a sale – those are great problems to sort out quickly, we know you’ll agree! We also want to see if there are any orders – we get notified of orders that happened overnight by email – so it’s always a good kick in the pants to see them and start the day off on the right foot.

Reply to email as fast as you can and your customers will have a real respect for you. I can’t even count the neumber of times I’e had people thank me for eing so prompt with returning their email. It means a lot to them because, as you probably know, sometimes you’ll wait 3 days for a reply from a company which has staff that were too busy to answer your query. Business is done in minutes online… not days. Don’t ever let a customer wait more than 24-hours to get a reply from you.

2. Visit your website – make sure it’s loading and make sure it’s loading fast enough. If you have a good host for your business – like Godaddy.com or Bluehost.com you’ll probably not have problems, but if you’re using a discount hosting service your business site might be down for days at a time and you wouldn’t know it.

3. Go to Google and enter some search terms your business website usually shows up for. Pay careful attention to the results. Google monitors websites that have harmful content on them. It’s not a comprehensive check, and it couldnt’ substitute for Norton’s products, but what you want to know is if Google is flagging your site for some reason. If you have sort of Google penalty your site won’t come up in the Google results – or it will come up way down the results list. You’ll want to go to Google Webmaster tools and straighten that out with Google ASAP. It’s essential that your business website is trusted by Google.

A tactic of many unscrupulous programmers is to plant code on unsuspected website owners’ sites. If that code is malicious Google will often find some of it and let you know in the search results or after you click your link.

We had it happen to us once and we lost Google’s trust and almost all of our sales until we got it straightened out. If you want to know more about Google and internet marketing we’ll have some free and premium courses here to help you.

Pricing Help

After incorporating your business you have a number of things to iron out. Pricing your business products and business services might be something you don’t quite know how to go about.

How can you get started?

Here are a couple resources you can use to get an idea what your business products and services should be selling for.

1. EBay. Everything possible has been tried on EBay and chances are that exactly what you’re selling – or something very similar to what your business is sellign is available on EBay. Ebay prices on new items are initially a little higher than market value until everyone else gets ahold of them and then the price plunges to bare-bottom margins. You’ll be able to see what the rock bottom prices are for consumers buying products and services you have on EBay.

Don’t be afraid! The prices are scary low on EBay and that’s because there are “business people” that have as a model, buy heaps of items direct from the manufacturers and sell them for the absolute minimum profit – just to undercut everyone else. EBay is bizarre like that – you’ll see prices you can’t believe, and sometimes you can’t believe them as there are a lot of scammers there. Look at the baseline that you see most people selling for and then use that as the price you compare against. Ignore the outliers selling for hundreds of dollars less than the rest – they are likely scammers.

2. On-site Polls. If you happen to have a WordPress blog as your business website you’re in luck. There are a number of excellent Poll plugins – free and with many options you can configure. Use them to query your business website visitors to see what prices they’d be willing to pay for various items and services.

3. Other Sites. You can write to the owner of a very popular blog with a lot of visitors and offer to pay them to allow you to write a post including a poll to query that blogger’s web visitors about prices they might be willing to pay for products and services like your business offers.

4. Twitter. We’ve used Twitter a number of times already to ask our followers about prices they’d be willing to pay for items we sell. If you don’t have the luxury of a large group of followers on Twitter you can offer to pay someone that does to tweet a couple of queries for you.