Seo for Soho: Free Web Page

Search engine optimization for Soho depends heavily on the number of back links you have. In other words, how many other websites are linking to you. Google gives a lot of weight to back links when ranking a website. For seo, the number of back links is definitely not he only factor that matters but it is an important measure that cannot be ignored.

Building back links to your website can be tedious, and time consuming especially if you attempt to contact other website owners to exchange links. Sometimes the requirements they demand in exchange for the privilege of linking to their website can be onerous and not worth the effort. If you are seriously interested in seo for your website you might want to consider using Veretekk's Seo Portals where you can populate 40 odd websites with links to your websites and that's just the beginning of what can be done. http://home-business.veretekk.com

There's also a no cost alternative at http://home-business.free-page.net . As the name suggests, you can get a free website, including hosting for free and there are no limits to the number of websites you can build. You don't need to know any real html other than to put <p> at the beginning of a paragraph and <p/> at the end of a paragraph. All you have to do is fill in the blanks with your contact information, 3 website links and a brief description of your product or services and you are on your way to having an unlimited number of  "gateway" web pages which you can use to build unlimited back links. It also makes a great online business card.

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Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

Home Business: Bread Business: No Place Too Far

In the late 90's all natural and organic breads sales were growing at health food stores because of growing consumer demand and the fact that the supermarkets were not interested in this niche market at the time. Bread Roots benefited by this boom and  expanded very fast. The problem was the whole market was new so we really did not know where to expand to next. So we just about went everywhere in Southern Ontario and into Montreal, Quebec. Six years later we do not go up North to North Bay or Sudbury, or to Montreal but we still cover a wide area. So on some routes we made money and some we definitely lost money. Before you start a route you can only hope for the best, estimating sales. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't: problem is you can lose a lot of money finding places to go that just doesn't work well for your profitability. It's because of issues like this that force businesses out of business. You have to be optimistic about growth to be in business but you can become too hopeful and lose big time.

Luckily we have made more right decisions than wrong decisions so far but we have to continually monitor weekly sales and expenses to stay on course. We now travel about 5,000 km per week with 3 trucks. In this time of historic gas prices increases, each route has to be scrutinized and evaluated in light of the new realities. Beside gas prices, there's a lot more competition now from the supermarkets which now carry many organic products including bread. We counter that by finding more niche markets within the bread and baking industry. Never a dull moment even when the trucks don't break down.

http://www.breadroots.com

You could hide under a rock and hope all these negative things aren't going to happen to you or you could do something about it. If you have lost something over the past 8 months--money, your house, your job, realize one thing- sometimes it takes a shock to start you on a new journey. Forget blaming yourself. Just start something new. Failure is not a person --failure is an event. The way things are now the common man is at the mercy of big business, big oil, big banks, big business. There is a niche which is open to all with the guts to get back up and start fighting for your economic rights and that is the home based business arena. Doing nothing is not an option. Make things happen for you, don't let things happen to you.

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Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

http://home-business.sohomatic.com

Home Business: Bread Business Phase 1 Continued

In the beginning I focused on owner operated stores like fruit and vegetable stores, delicatessens, cheese shops and butcher shops. The best stores were the fruit and vegetable stores but herein lay a huge problem for me since most were only open from May til the end of October. So like the sausage business, I was stuck in a seasonal market to some degree. Two stores became my best customers: a health food store in Peterborough and an organic fruit and vegetable store in Whitby. These stores were open year round and both sold good volume. Health food stores intimated me a little back then and I only went in them to see if they were interested in my organic line of bread I was distributing. They were.

Sales were consistent year round but the business was not that great. Some stores were only ordering $25 worth of bread. I eventually discovered the secret through fear of losing my business to the bakery. The bakery  started making noises about opening a retail store in the middle of my main market as well as delivering to supermarkets in the area. They had often suggested I get more lines to sell but I resisted. Suddenly, more lines became the solution to keep my business going. I also found out something very useful. Some of the stores who ordered $25 worth of bread now ordered $75 worth of bread because I was supplying what they wanted.

After a few years of delivering in station wagon, I upgraded to 15 year old Chevy van. Suddenly, I had a lot more space and I also realized that the station wagon (not the original VW Fox) was actually keeping a lid on my business because I no more room. Within 2 weeks of getting the "new" van, it was 75% full. There was no way in the world the product would have fit in the station wagon. This happened again to me when I upgraded from the van to a Cube Van.

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

Home Business: Bread Business Phase 1

When I decided to close the sausage business I also had the task of finding a new business. I quickly decided I wasn't going after a job so I looked around, asked some questions and decided to see if I could sell all an natural, 7 grain bread form a local bakery in Peterborough. The bakery was always at the Peterborough Farmers Market and they always sold out by 12 noon. Selling my sausages across the way from them, I got a good view of customer response. I then talked to the owners of the bakery about selling the bread to stores in the area. At that time (1995), they only served health food stores via couriers. Now they serve every supermarket in sight. They agreed to let me give it a try so I got samples, made up a pricelist and went to 5 stores one Thursday afternoon. In retrospect, these stores were far from the ideal market for the product but at that time I just didn't know the market. I was just excited that 4 out of 5 said yes. I often wonder if I would have continued if all 5 had said no. As a result, I started my first route using a Volkswagen Fox mini station wagon as a delivery vehicle.

I learned quickly that guaranteed sale did not work for me at all. A deli ordered 5 light rye bread and could not sell any so I took them back. They didn't look that bad to me so I took them out of the bag and fed them to the wildlife one the Ganaraska River in Port Hope. Many bakers use guaranteed sale to get the products into the store. I think it just promotes waste. Supermarkets only care that there shelves are full, they don't have any real responsibility for the bread because the sale is guaranteed which means the bakery or distributor takes the loss. I found that they really cared about shelf life. Back then most regular bread lasted 10 days to 2 weeks or longer because it was full of preservatives. My health all natural bread only lasted 6 days. For many supermarkets, shelf life seems more important than human life. Preservatives in bread didn't seem to matter much. The look of the package was much more important than was actually in the bag. Back in 1995, I was talking about all the trans fats in baking as a health issue. It took another 10 years for this to become a mainstream health issue. More to come.

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

http://home-business.money-machine.net

Home Business: Sausage Business

The sausage business was not all bad. I enjoyed making them, I enjoyed getting positive feed back from our customers which I still got even 10 years after we closed down. I did not enjoy all the washing up and cleaning up I had to do. I was a great learning experience for my children at a very impressionable age. In the mid nineties they would have been in their early teens. As in most home businesses children often help out. Besides doing jobs around the store like serving customers, handling cash and doing other odd jobs, they also went to the markets interacting with all kinds of customers and promoting the sausages. In order to do this they had to get up at 4 am to be on the road by 5 am so we could be at the Toronto market by 7 am. This was a big stretch for them but they did it. They certainly got a front row seat to running a small home based business. Both my children have excellent interpersonal skills and have always had great personal confidence in dealing one on one with adults. Now adults themselves these skills are becoming extremely beneficial in the work they do.

Your children watch you and even though they never admit it, you are a role model. Starting a home based business can have a wonderful impact on family life if the children and spouse are involved. I know this is not always possible but, when it is, it will create lifelong memories. If the business does note work out, start another one as I did with bread. It's good for the children to know that failure is not a person but an event and that if something does fail you simply start all over doing something else until you get it right.

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

 Home Business: Making Sausages

One of the reasons I moved out of Toronto was to find someplace to start a home based business making  homemade sausage. I had become hooked on making these great sausages at home in Toronto and I had even sold them to a few customers. We found a place in Bewdley Ontario located just across the road from Rice Lake. The place was less than ideal with a house much smaller than we had in Toronto but it had several outbuildings, 2 of which had income so it looked like a good deal at the time. Trouble is I didn't know Bewdley when I bought it but I'm sure the ReMax agent who sold it to me did. Let's say it doesn't have the greatest reputation for anything except maybe fishing, hunting, cheap rent. Sometimes, I got the feeling that the visitors thought that this wasn't really part of Ontario and they could do anything they liked. It was kind of like what I imagine the Wild West was like. In hindsight, it was probably the worse location in Ontario to open a gourmet home sausage store.

People tell you things like customers will go anywhere for something good. Well they might for big items like good deals on fridges, stoves and automobiles--big ticket items but they won't travel for a package of sausages. We made up to 33 varieties of sausages. Most were pork, some chicken, some beef and some lamb. I have to say they were very big on flavour, low in fat and all natural. All natural was just a new thing in the early 90's. Business was good sometimes in the summer but it was basically the pits. I was commuting to my appraisal "job" in Toronto and later to Oshawa which was closer. The appraisal business was very slow in the early 90's so I just sort of drifted away and the sausage business took over.

Sales in Bewdley were lousy so we investigated some farmer's markets. We subsequently went to markets in Toronto, Peterborough, Port Hope and Cobourg. Trouble was that 3 out of 4 of these markets were only open for the summer so we basically starved in the winter. It wasn't any fun. It was just too much work making these sausages by hand with too little income. I just didn't think it was fair to me or my family to continue.

I still needed to make an income. I was about 50 and considered myself unemployable since I had been self employed for about 20 years by then. I looked around to see what I could do and found it in a loaf of all natural bread. More to come.

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.colm-maher.com

http://www.home-business.bz

Home Business:Real Estate Appraisal

The appraisal business was a natural fit form because I knew the Toronto real estate market in the 70's and I am detail oriented. The fact that I could work from home and be set my own hours was very helpful. In this age before cell phones, my pager worked well to enable me to do my real estate sales business on the side. These were mainly form mortgage appraisals for banks and trust companies. The appraisal required a home inspection, comparable sales inspection and a written report. These were in the days before such forms could be done on computer (there were no computers in the 70's). In a good week I would do 15 appraisals and 20 plus in a really good week. I did my inspections and appointments during the day and wrote the appraisals at night at home. In the early 80's computer real estate sale searches became available as well as fax machines. Both these technologies just made working from home even more viable.

The basic premise in real estate appraisal is that the value is based on "the highest and best use" of a particular property. Such issues as zoning by laws, official plans, location and economic trends are all factors in any appraisal. I always felt you would have to be a super duper real estate expert to base a opinion considering all these factors. Since, I could plainly see most of these issues were only casually addressed, I could not see a long term future for my self as a real estate professional.

In the late 1980's, house prices were going through the roof because of rampant amateur speculators driving up the market. I really felt that the value of properties could not be supported so I started looking at other options. A market correction in the early 90's proved me right but I was out of it by then.

More information

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

http://home-business.veretekk.com

My Home Business Experiences

Back in 1976, 33 years ago, I started my first home based business because my well paid government job became the pits.

I had just gone through the experience of buying a house in Toronto and was impressed with the real estate business. This positive impression was in stark contrast to my poor impression of working for the Ministry Of Health for Ontario. So at 30 years old, I quit my "good job" and became self employed as a real estate salesperson. I have never had a job since although I have had a number of home based businesses. For the first 4 years I was fulltime in sales then for about 8 years, I was a real estate appraiser as well as a salesman. So I had 2 businesses going at once. Eventually, I settled on appraisal because I could work at home more and have more of a family life.

When you are in real estate sales, you are the business. Everything revolves around you. Because it is such a fast past environment where timing can be everything, it's difficult to call time your own. You are at the continuous beck and call of your clients whether they be the buyer or the seller. After you have worked weeks on end without a day off and done this for several years in a row, your attitude can suffer a bit. Sometimes you've been up til  2 am presenting offers that went nowhere and met a number of vendors that basically want to give you a pay cut. Other days, you may have planned a family day but either purchasers or vendors call you to show a house. It can become a perpetual guilt trip based on working too many hours and the feeling guilty about taking days off. Since you are the business, you are on call 24/7. It can be fun for a while but not in the long term.

The appraisal business took care of some of these issues but more on that tomorrow.

Colm Maher 1 905 372 9111

http://www.home-business.bz

http://home-business.veretekk.com

Thinking the Right Thoughts