Franchise businesses have gained in popularity over the years with many new and innovative franchise opportunities entering the market. Spectacular advancements in the field of information and communication technologies have also given a boost to the franchise networks and allowed them to expand across geographies.

Particularly for new and aspiring entrepreneurs a franchise may be one of the most viable options to be considered. The prevailing global economic slowdown is forcing many companies to downsize, resulting in pay cuts and job losses for many employees. New jobs are difficult to come by, and in any case many people are unable to achieve job satisfaction at work. In addition to this, there are many stay at home moms who are considering working in order to contribute financially to their households in the current times.

For all new entrepreneurs, a franchise holds out a promise of setting up your independent business with the backup of an established organization to support them. The key advantages of a franchise option for a budding entrepreneur are as follows:

1. The total expertise and experience of the franchiser is readily available to the entrepreneur from day one. One does not need to learn the hard way through a maze of mistakes and ‘hit and trial’ methods because the franchiser will pass on everything they have learned in an efficient package to the entrepreneur.
2. The franchiser has an established brand name and goodwill that can be capitalized by the franchisee entrepreneur. In any new business there is a long lead period required till the business can establish a reputation for itself. A franchise offers established goodwill and reputation so that you start earning revenues from the start.
3. The franchiser provides the technical backup and knowledge. There is a whole team of support professionals who are ready to assist you wherever you face any hurdles or hiccups in the functioning of your business.
4. The franchiser takes care of the marketing, advertising and promotional activities at the broader level, while you may have to contribute to it at the local level. Your business gets the automatic benefits of economies of scale that a franchise network enjoys in terms of marketing and advertising.
5. Business systems have been usually refined and perfected already by the franchiser. Therefore, it allows the entrepreneur to run his business within the prescribed set of parameters and maximize the efficiencies of business. In other words, the business process is highly simplified and organized which makes it easy for the entrepreneur to run the show smoothly.

Looking at these benefits of a franchise business, it makes pragmatic business sense for budding entrepreneurs to consider various franchise options offered by established franchise brands in the marketplace.

Bio: Bizymoms has been helping women start work at home businesses for over 10 years. Now, with our Franchises for Moms section giving great home business ideas, women can start their own franchise business!

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

A Franchise Business Is a Viable Alternative for New Entrepreneurs

Well, there are many answers to these questions, but the one that matters the most is a simple: because I am a mother now.

My son, Paul-Jules, is 9 months today – easy to see that the past nine months were heaven for me. The months before his birth were not easy at all: I had a difficult pregnancy; a time I would rather forget than discuss here or anywhere else. I just mention it because many mothers and expecting women don’t have to cut work till the last minute. I had to do it from the first months – exhaustion and stress might have ended with a tragedy. I thank God for being on my side and giving me this wonderful baby.

I will not start now a mommy blog, nor do I have the intention to broadcast my child from now on. This is a onetime announcement: I am proud to be a mom, but I will focus my online activities on professional issues rather than private.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Meet Paul-Jules, My Pride and Joy

The Consequences of Truth for Carrie Prejean

Miss California USA Carrie Prejean is fired by Donald Trump after dogged efforts to see her dethroned, if not humiliated. These events beg the question; “Is truthfulness still a valuable trait?” Even Trump seemed reluctant to criticize Prejean for taking the same stance on same sex marriage as our President.

Clinipace Selects Crossroads Public Relations as PR Agency

Crossroads Public Relations will be taking on Clinipace´s publicity campaign and working to help boost the company´s visibility. Clinipace offers medical trial services and technology.

Twitter Is Haiku, If You Didn’t Know it by Now

I remember a Kobayashi Issa haiku that applies to the whole Twitter phenomenon:

how irritating!
the wild geese freely
call their friends

Obama’s Solution To Child Internet Safety – Wolves Guarding Sheep?

With our kids safety in the balance, who are the people behind the administration’s efforts to protect them? Is a hard line in any direction the wise route to solving our concerns? Let’s take an initial look at what could be behind the scenes.

EcoGreenHotel Joins Forces with Winters Advertising

EcoGreenHotel has teamed up with Winters Advertising and Public Relations to offer a mixture of sustainability and marketing services to clients, thus expanding the client base for both companies.

Online PR Principles: How Not to Write a Blog Entry

If you do some or all of the following blogging mistakes, nobody will be interested in what you have to say, you will alienate your readers and potential customers and the list could go on.

Is Buying a Ford a Decision Influenced by Smart PR?

Ford should be very careful making promises in times of financial crisis. If the auto market stays the same, Ford might be forced to ask for federal loans, despite the recent gain in market share.

Brammo Chooses Weber Shandwick As Agency of Record

Brammo has selected Weber Shandwick to help them release their first electric motorcycle, the Enertia. The launch will take place in July, in the city of Portland and the bike is being unveiled at Best Buy.

Waggener Edstom Given World’s Toughest PR Task! Selling Bing

Having spent thousands of hours testing, analyzing, reviewing and hoping for “meaning” in search, Microsoft and their PR Waggener Edstrom reveal Bing. If the name sounds like something your car engine does when it is broken, there are reasons. Waggener’s job is not an enviable one, even given virtually unlimited funds.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Latest News from Everything PR

My personal preferences however are irrelevant in this situation. Secondbrain made a decision that will probably appeal more to its customers, although I can anticipate some voices against this more (particularly from those who used Secondbrain as what it was initially advocated: the place to store “all your content”).

Secondbrain is rebuilding and reinventing itself, on a base of over 11,500 users. The service will offer only online bookmarking from now on. In the future probably Secondbrain will support social media service and file uploading again, but these are gone for now and so are all imported items (picture, video, messages, bookmarks, etc) from other social media services. What stayed with Secondbrain are items manually placed in collections.

Delicious bookmarks imports are no longer available either – there is however an option to export data manually from delicious and then import the file to Secondbrain.

As for the “social networking” aspect, there is no longer an option to follow people – Secondbrain would rather have you follow “topics” or “collections” instead. This means, from a user perspective, more control over the updates received. I wouldn’t call this a smart move though: every social network I ever joined had as motivation meeting people with similar interests. As for updates, topics, collections and news, I can always use other services, like Google News. This being said, I like the new interface: it looks cleaner and more user friendly. What I don’t like is the impossibility to communicate with other users, the impossibility to create a community (which was always one of Secondbrain’s weaknesses).

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

A New Secondbrain: Simplified, Clean, Easier to Use

You already know that I know my SEO and it should not come as a surprise that Pamil Visions is ranking on the first page in Google for ‘online public relations’ – but we are not the only company on that page.

For the sake of the argument I will compare my company with other two present on the first page in Google to see which one would make the best choice as a PR+SEO vendor.

Top Three Companies for “online public relations”

The top three companies ranking for ‘online public relations’ are toprankblog.com, pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com. You will probably see them ranking differently, depending on your geo location – from where I search toprankblog.com is the third result on the front page after online-pr.com (which is a PR resource and not a PR company); pamil-visions.com is the forth result and cyberspeaker.com ranks first on the second page. Results preceding cyberspeaker.com are either PR distribution sites or subdomains of a common shared platform like blogsite.com that cannot be accurately analyzed without access to their analytics.

According to Alexa, this is the percentage of search visits that came to toprankblog.com, pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com from a search engine.

Clearly, there are more visits from a search engine to toprankblog.com than to pamil-visions.com, whereas cyberspeaker.com doesn’t even make the chart. Toprankblog.com does a better job at attracting search engine traffic than any of the analyzed sites.

The “Site Appeal” Test

I always said that rankings don’t matter if you cannot make people stay on your site. The most important factor when it comes to optimizing a site is the “appeal.” SEO can boost you in the SERPs, but it is up to you to make the sale – it is up to you to keep a visitor on your site, to make that visitor spend time there browsing and taking the actions you desire.
Measuring bounce rates gives a pretty accurate idea on site appeal.

Pamil-visions.com does a better job at keeping visitors online, despite the fact that its bounce rate over the past three months was greater than 50% – 66.5% to be more exact. But compared to 78.1% for toprankblog.com 66.5% is much better (with bounce rate a lower number is better).

However, bounce rates may and may not be relevant. Good SEO means more search traffic and sometimes search traffic is less targeted than other types of traffic.

Analyzing the “time on site” for these companies may be a better indication that people are enjoying the site:

Surprisingly cyberspeaker.com does make the chart and wins at this category, while pamil-visions.com comes in second and toprankblog.com is the third. Cyberspeaker.com hardly gets any visits, but obviously when that happens the visitors “stick” around. However, in this situation, the time on site for cyberspeaker.com is hardly an indicator. The site probably gets 10 visitors per day – if one of those spends 20 minutes on site, the graphic above makes sense. However, we have to choose from a site with a decent number of daily visitors: pamil-visions.com has clearly better times on site than toprankblog.com

The “In-Links” Test

According to Alexa, pamil-visions.com has only 81 links in (multiple links from the same sites are only counted once), while toprankblog.com has 3238 and cyberspeaker.com 169. However, for the same sites Yahoo Site Links shows 613 in links for pamil-visions.com, 5628 for toprankblog.com and only 18 for cyberspeaker.com. The winner is toprankblog.com, followed by pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com

And the winner is: toprankblog.com!

Although it is losing the time on site and bounce rate tests, toprabnkblog.com is the site with the most traffic. How do they do it? Obviously not only via search engines, where pamil-visions.com almost equals its numbers, but via other referring sites as well. Considering the large number of links, we can easily assume that these send an important percentage of the visits to toprankblog.com too. Social networks also play a very important role.

The reason why toprankblog.com is so popular is also the brand man who owns it: Lee Odden. Another very important aspect is that toprankblog.com is mainly focused on SEO, with PR as a secondary discipline, whereas pamil-visions.com has different priorities.

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How to Select a PR Company That Knows SEO

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Celebrity Twitter Overkill

It is pointless to start writing about why the idea is S.T.U.P.I.D! I consider Big Brother a stupid show, but the fact is that it is still broadcast, which means that the publics like it. This is proof that stupid ideas make big money. This is also proof that instead of trying to learn something deep, profound and life enriching, people feel the need to “tweet.” So here it is, the intelligent response to the TV competition plans of Twitter.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

The Ultimate Twitter Reality Video

Not long ago I wrote at Everything PR about Google’s Foul PR Game. I noted there:

I am sure, as we speak, that Google actually considers buying Twitter and considers it carefully. Confirmed or not, rumors of a purchase are probably well founded. Discussing a possible collaboration in search is just smoke they throw in our eyes. Google cannot afford to lose Twitter, but on the other hand, they are probably not able to buy it, due to the latest “anti-trust” developments.

But after reading Google ‘falling behind Twitter’ it all became clear: Google is lower than a snake’s belly. They were always interested in Twitter. They said for so long that they are not afraid of it, that they do not consider it competition, etc, just to throw smoke in our eyes. True, they cannot buy, but who says that they didn’t already close a deal “under the table”

The secret love relationship between Twitter and Google will soon be confirmed. Sure Twitter wouldn’t sell to Facebook and Apple. Sure Twitter would say “we are not for sale” – after all, they already sold their soul to the devil (and we all know what happens to those who do that). Remember that you read it here first.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Google’s Secret Love Affair

Twitter is not groundbreaking technology. It’s hype and hype pushed to extreme. Twitter is also a fragmented world, a puzzle of thoughts, links, actions and people. For the trained marketer Twitter is also advertising, editorial content, a window to human nature and to what makes people take action.

Twitter never surprised me, its success was predictable: a pitiful name for a brand, but somehow “cute” and catchy (pitiful in an even worse sense than “Google” – another example of bad name gone great). People are now reduced to a flock of silly birds that are chirping at the same time, but never at unison. There is no harmony on Twitter: just scattered thoughts, sometimes revolving around the same topics, more often following the interest of the “tweep.”

Twitter is stupid, oh yes, but paradoxically it powers global intelligence. The brightest minds of our times joined the flock, and spend time here, trying to figure out what is the force that drives this chat room at times.

At the other side of the spectrum we have the Britney Spears and the Kutchers, the VIPs who use the network to pull some headlines in the magazines, because honestly, there is no such a thing of an “altruistic” use of a social network. Everyone is there for a purpose: marketers to market, VIPs to gain buzz, lonely people to feel less lonely.

So why are you on Twitter?

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Twitter Thoughts

Logo designing is an art and if practiced after years of learning in art schools and with hands on experience, it can do wonder for the clients. There are different types of graphic designers in the design industry, with expertise in different areas. Some are great logo designers, some are expert website designers, some are good at designing banners and some are brochure design specialist. Apart from that, there are logo designers who work independently, whereas, there are others who are a part of a logo design company. But no matter what, you as a business owner have to be vigilant while hiring a logo designer for your logo project and you can do it right only if you know what are the pros and cons of different types of designers. Also, I am going to cover what you as a client should do before finalizing a logo designer for your logo project.

Usually, you start with your need analysis and budget setting. According to that you initiate the search process.

The Do’s of a Business Owner.

1. Need Analysis and Budget Setting: First of all, you as a business owner have to gather your Specifications. What exactly do you want? You need to figure out, what are the elements that you require besides the logo. You might need designs for your business cards and letterhead as well. Moreover, there is a possibility that your business needs an online presence and for that website design is what you should have. If that’s the case, where you require a complete package of design services, you need to make an appropriate budget. Once you are done with that, start searching for freelancers and logo design companies for your project.
2. Initiate Search Process: The next step is to start your search for the freelance designers and the logo design companies, both online and offline. Make a list for both the categories keeping your requirements in mind. Of course your search should have the criteria of the price according to the budget set. You would ultimately shortlist two or three of them to choose from. I won’t rule in favor of any one of them since there are top class freelancers serving the market and there are specialized logo design companies with very affordable yet professional design services.

The Don’ts of a Business Owner.

1. Do it yourself design services: If you are a professional, don’t ever fall in the trap of Do it yourself design services. Many online companies provide software for this as well. Business owners knowing that they don’t know nothing about logo designing take the risk of buying that software, thinking that they would end up designing a logo for their business according to their own preferences and needs – This is an ultimate mistake!
2. Never ignore some Key Aspects: As a business owner, you would regret if you don’t carefully look at the following key areas of a freelancer or a logo design company. Do check their portfolio, their experience, their specialization, their references and client testimonials. This gives you an idea about the credibility of that freelance logo designer or logo design company.

However, there are some known advantages and disadvantages associated with freelance designers and logo design companies, which I want you to go through before finalizing any of them for your logo design.

Pros and Cons of a Freelance Logo Designer

There is a mushroom growth of freelance designers these days. However, it is said that hiring a freelance designer is a risk as most of them are mere starters and don’t know much about graphic designing as such. Well, it all depends upon the budget as well; if you have a big budget set for this project, you can go for a freelance designer, who is renowned and is the best in this field. An expert designer’s guidance would be of enormous support in delineating your logo and there is no comparison to it.

Pros:

The following are the advantages of a freelancer:

• Renowned freelancers are reliable to work with
• They focus on few projects unlike big design agencies
• They can be cost-effective and they can be
• Minimum turnaround time
• Can be an expert in logo designing

Cons:

• They may disappear for some time, they are less accountable
• Sometimes low price indicates low quality work
• You can’t have face to face meetings with your freelance designer
• One designer means less concepts or similar concepts
• Your freelancer can be a teenage amateur
• Credibility is one issue
• Can use a design template
• Don’t offer money back guarantee

Pros and Cons of an Online Logo Design Company

Type ‘logo design’ in any of the search engines and you will get a list of design companies offering various features at different prices. Set your priorities straight. Go for the best option. Check their design galleries and then take any decision.

Pros:

Online logo design companies are getting very popular each passing day and a lot many businesses are contacting them to get their logo designed.

• Cost-effective
• Expertise in logo designing
• Professional and accountable
• Renowned logo design companies are reliable to work with
• Handle large number of customers
• Have a battalion of professional logo designers
• More designers signify more logo concepts
• More designers indicate broader skill set
• They are secure to work with. They won’t disappear anywhere
• Fixed turnaround time
• 24/7 customer support
• Most of them offer money back guarantee

Cons:

• No face to face meetings with the designers
• Not suitable for entire branding projects

To sum it up, clients should do their part of the job by doing thorough need analysis and budget setting, while keeping in mind the pros and cons attached with both freelancers and logo design companies. Remember! Your logo would be the face of your business and it is a fact that nobody recognizes an average looking logo. So try to get hold on a logo designer, who comes up with a remarkable logo, because that is what matters in the end. Let me know what you think, could there be more pros and cons attached to both the categories? Hit back in the comments section.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Pros and Cons of Different Types of Logo Designers