Shipping out of Province: Should You Charge Them HST?
Posted on September 5th, 2010
I’m still getting lots of mail about GST and HST, mainly about whether businesses should be charging GST (the Goods and Services Tax), HST (Harmonized Sales Tax), PST (Provincial Sales Tax) or what when they ship goods and/or services out of province.
For instance, K.S. writes:
I am a little confused on the HST rules. We are a business based in Quebec. If a supplier from Ontario ships us merchandise to our plant in Quebec, should they invoice us HST and QST on top of HST?
The taxes you charge depend on where you’re shipping to. As I explain in Online Business and HST, if you are selling goods or services out of province, you charge the GST/HST rate based on where the goods are being shipped to.
Therefore, if you ship to B.C., charge 12%, to Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, or New Brunswick, charge 13%, to Nova Scotia 15% and if you sell to Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec or Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut or the Yukon, only charge 5% (the GST rate).
So K.S.’s supplier should only be charging her 5%, the GST rate.
As to how to charge taxes, this pair of sample invoices include an explanation of what has to go on your invoice:
- How to Invoice with GST and PST
- How to Invoice with HST
6 Common SMB SEO Mistakes (& How to Fix Them)
Posted on September 2nd, 2010
I’m not an SEO expert. Lucky for me, my partners in crime over at Outspoken Media are. But even though I’m not an expert, that doesn’t mean I’m not careful to pay close attention to SEO best practices when creating and publishing content. Paying mind to search engine optimization ensures that I’m giving the search engines all the clues they need to determine what my content is about, while also giving customers what they need to know, as well. And if someone as non-technical as I can do it, then you savvy SMB owners can do it too. You definitely can.
Below you’ll find 6 common SMB SEO mistakes and how to very easily fix them.
Mistake: Using duplicate Title tags
Your Title tag is the hyperlinked text a user will click on when your site comes up in their search results. And when they click on your link and go to your page, it’s the Title tag that sits at the top of their browser acting as a headline for your page. Both these facts should tell you that crafting a good one is really important. So why are you ignoring it? Spend time writing unique Title tags for every page on your site. The goal of your Title tag is to tell visitors what the page is about, while also making it compelling enough that they’ll want to click through. For example, don’t make the Title tag for your site’s home page [home]. This doesn’t tell anyone what that page is about, nor would it entice anyone to click on it. Instead, use something like [Business Name + Keyword].
Mistake: Having no content
Your Web site needs content. The search engines need something to rank and you need a way to show authority with users and answer their questions. You want to write at least one page of content for every product or service that you offer. I know it’s a lot of work, but this is your business. If you have a retail Web site, don’t just copy the 3-line manufacturer description because everyone is using that description. Write your own. Write a real About page, write a company history page, have a page on all of your employees, etc. Create video content showing people using your product, create a video about how users can hack your product to be better, create a video giving customers a tour of your headquarters. Let them submit their own videos. Write text to go with the videos. Start a blog. Create a podcast. Include text with your images. Use Google’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions Tool to see what people are asking about in your niche. There are so many ways to get content on your site, take advantage of them. A site with no content is a wasted opportunity.
Mistake: Keyword-less URLs
Don’t STUFF them, but whenever possible you should be trying to get keywords into your URLs to help with your site’s search engine optimization. If you’re using WordPress, I recommend going in and tweaking your settings to better accomplish this. You can do that by going to Settings > Permalinks and selecting the radio button marked Custom Structure. Once you’re there you can decide if you want your URLs to end with /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. Depending on which you prefer, you’ll want to paste in one of the following pieces of code:
- /%category%/%postname%/>
- /%postname%/
And that’s it. Now you’ll be able to very easily alter your URLs to make them as keyword-rich and search engine-friendly as you can.
Mistake: Poor internal linking
We talk a lot about the power of links in SEO. How you want people to link to you with keyword-rich anchor text as a way of telling the search engines that you are relevant to those terms. Well, then why aren’t you linking to yourself the same way? When you’re linking between pages on your site, make sure you’re using preferred anchor text to give yourself a boost in the search engines and give users a keyword-rich path to follow. You may not be able to control how other people link to you, but you can control how you link within your own site. Make it count.
Mistake: Using photos instead of text
I see this one a lot with small businesses. Mary owns a bakery on Main Street. The home page of her site is nothing more than a .jpg of her storefront with a link to the food menu. When you click on the Menu link to see what sounds good, you’re shown a scanned PDF version of the menu. This may be usable from a customer standpoint (and even that’s arguable), however, it’s useless from a search standpoint. The search engines can’t see or read your images. To them, Mary’s home page is blank and the menu doesn’t exist. If you want to appear in the search engines you have to give the robots something to use to rank your site. And that means content. Whenever you’re using a photo, make sure there is also text to accompany it. And don’t rely on photos when words will do.
Mistake: Not using Alt tags with images
Related to the item above, spiders can’t see or read images. To help them get an idea of what the image is about, you need to include alt text that describes the image on the page. If you can, write the alt text to include a relevant keyword to again get that added boost. Again, it’s one of those small, little things that has a real impact.
Those are a few easy ways that you can quickly boost the SEO power of your content. They may seem like little things, but together, they pack a mighty powerful SEO punch.
Most Common Entrepreneurs Error
Posted on September 1st, 2010
As a business owner and marketing, it is significant employment offer must know what types of businesses. They will also find their business in nature with the move, because people should know this. What is important here to learn how they work in an organization should include the selection of the server. Much to learn of what common mistakes most entrepreneurs make on a business is to assess marketing staff to workers to be useful.
A common mistake that entrepreneurs, business partners, forgotten founder of the problem as income in the first stage is known. Is sponsored by a company or a market now open to the public is ready to use, has contributed to the project partners see their jobs back. For the founders of this early and by the inclusion, the issue of shares to be abolished is a problem. To undertake shares as part of the eye, each of the founding companies of all proposed measures, a new corporate debt may be present. Before planning any major created to avoid the beginning or in the future, no financial problems, were defined. If you are late, you can begin the developers, the discussion about the difference in the stock price to create tax problems.
CP can handle mistakes entrepreneurs and venture capital market, the absence of an experienced lawyer. Say by a lawyer of their choice selection of many capitalist firms generally rate decision developers. With significant business experience, listening to catch the people some of the prominent lawyers, the negative side, it will likely focus rents. Much more entrepreneurial than those used for games is it better to hire someone. Deals to close quickly, easily understood in a position to human experience in this kind of lawyer. Common problems faced by these entrepreneurs also a smart business owner can recommend.
The only thing that matters should not be studied in detail in the selection process or a venture capital despite the assessment interview. Venture Capital is compensated in many ways has a large portfolio. Events in high cumulative preferred dividends, redemption and the main anti-dilution protection rights for several years, participation exercisable, include without lid.
An ambitious entrepreneur or entrepreneur must know what common mistakes entrepreneurs. To raise awareness of issues of legal and illegal, to avoid potential problems and working properly, you may want the job to come up with. They, not the legal aspects of entrepreneurship and corporate governance, violations and the resulting application have to pay a higher price.
Time Management Tips for Fall
Posted on August 31st, 2010
Changed schedules and vacations make it even tougher than usual to juggle business, family and play and back to school season can make it seem like there’s just too many balls in the air.
If ‘busy’ and ‘stressed’ describe you, knock some of the stress out of fall with my 11 Time Management Tips.
These other time management resources of mine will also help make it easier to balance your work and life while still accomplishing what you need to do:
- Organize Your Life!
- A System for Effective Time Management
- 5 Ways to Get More Time
5 Essential Characteristics for Today’s Marketer
Posted on August 29th, 2010
Today’s world of fast-paced technology advancements and ever-evolving media and marketing techniques requires marketers to be much more versatile than they had to be in the past. No longer are a you going to survive with a degree in marketing and a course on PPC under your belt.
The game has changed! Do you have what it takes?
Here are the five essential characteristics to be successful as a marketer in today’s world:
Risk Taker – The Internet has enabled “everyone” to be an Internet marketer. With that evolution, the amount of competition you have has increased exponentially–and your competition is much more diverse, skilled and savvy than ever before. In order for your marketing activities to be noticed among the barrage of messages out there, you’ve got to be a little daring. If you’re not willing to try new things, be a little uncomfortable and take some risk, you’ll drown in the sea of similar marketers, similar messages, and bland ideas.
Recommendation: Spend a day dreaming big. Let your mind wander. Come up with ways to get massive, immediate exposure for your business. Don’t let any limitations get in the way. Then, narrow it down to something realistic, yet crazy, and go do it. Have some fun.
Mad Scientist – Risk needs to be balanced with logic. This is where the Mad Scientist comes in. Recognize that I said “Mad” Scientist, not just scientist. Marketing has always been part science and part art. In the past, the science part was less visible and less accessible to the masses. Now, with Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, e-mail marketing (complete with open and click reports) and many other tools, tracking your marketing activites – both successes and failures – is easy. These tools bringthe science of marketing to any computer anywhere in the world. If you’re not the type that likes to experiment, test hypotheses, tweak the experiment and test again – over and over and over – then you may not be cut out to be a modern-day marketer. But, if you love test tubes, titration and mass spectrometry, it’s time to turn your skills in the scientific method into your method for determining what works in marketing.
Recommendation: Read everything you can at MarketingExperiments.com. Learn from others’ findings and get ideas for your own experiments.
Geeky Analyst - Experimenting is one thing. But analyzing the data afterward is an entirely different story. It takes a different skill set – a different kind of warped mind – to sit and look at the results through every possible lens to determine cause and effect, determine the salient variable, and ultimately determine what the data is actually telling you. If your inner geek gets excited about slicing and dicing the numbers and the reports, then marketing might be your specialty.
Recommendation: Read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics 2.0. It’s not for the faint of heart, but there’s definite gold in those hills.
Code Monkey – A general working knowledge of basic Web layout and programming is required for today’s marketer. Why? Because you can’t devise an experiment if you don’t know what’s testable. You don’t need to know how to write a Java applet, but you need to understand basic HTML and CSS layout as well as the limitations of server-side and client-side scripting. Armed with this knowledge, the Mad Scientist in you can go to work devising all kinds of schemes for testing everything under the sun. Make sure the Analyst in you keeps the Mad Scientist in check. Too much data can be a bad thing.
Recommendation: Launch a WordPress site that you can mess with. Then, use the built-in editor to edit your Theme. Play with it, experiment, change font colors, sizes, styles, etc. Get familiar with the basic HTML tags and CSS styles.
Copywriter - Every good marketer needs to be able to write compelling copy (or at least be able to recognize it). Compelling copy is not always as cute, funny or clever as you may want it to be. That’s why the Mad Scientist tests everything. But decent copywriting skills can quicken the testing process by getting started with proven ideas. There’s no need to become a world-class writer, but understanding the psychology of writing powerful copy is a must.
Recommendation: Study John Carlton’s Simple Writing System. Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini and everything you can find by Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham and other classic copywriters and marketers.
I don’t claim to be an expert at any one of these (except maybe the “Mad” part of “Mad Scientist”), but I do find myself continually seeking knowledge in each of these areas to become a better marketer. How does this stack up against what you’re seeing? Are there other characteristics you feel are essential? Let me know by commenting below.