Business and Investing

Posted on Tuesday, 27th September 2011 by James Martin

Great Harvest Bread helps Think Pink

The Great Harvest Bread Co. in Redding is raising money for Nor-Cal Think Pink Breast Cancer Awareness.

The store at Hilltop Drive is selling oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with all proceeds during October being donated to the cause to honor National Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Great Harvest Bread is partnering with Tri Counties Bank to support Nor-Cal Think Pink Day, which is Oct. 20.

The store is open from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call 222-8083, or go to greatharvestbreadredding.com for more information.

Barnes & Noble honors teachers

Barnes & Noble Booksellers will celebrate October Educator Appreciation Week on Oct. 15-23.

All stores will offer special discounts and promotions for pre-kindergarten through grade 12 administrators and educators.

As part of the celebration, Barnes & Noble stores will host special events and workshops focused on new Nook e-reader devices.

The Barnes & Noble bookstore in Redding on Churn Creek Road will host its reception at 5 p.m.

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Posted on Monday, 26th September 2011 by James Martin

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Emily Lessard and Brock Plantinga practice welding at the Roanoke Technical Education Center.

Teacher Sandra Johnston demonstrates a cleaning technique to student Brock Plantinga during a welding class at the Roanoke Technical Education Center, which is adjacent to Patrick Henry High School.

Amina Mekic does her hair in a cosmetology class at the Burton Center for Arts and Technology

The latest from The Ticker blog

• Three Blacksburg-Montgomery County companies ranked in Inc.

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Posted on Thursday, 22nd September 2011 by Jesse Walker

Further to yesterday’s post where we talked about the strength of the Google (and search in general) in serving relevant ads, at the time when the customer was actually actively researching a particular topic, rather than simply interrupting your attention with a commercial message when you were happily doing something else, I couldn’t help but post, in full, the , explaining the reason why, in his view, Facebook decided to take down their conversion tracking tool.

Personally I’d say that the most likely reason was that the conversion stats sucked, but this is his take – full marks for being on message!

**I spent the last summer interning on Facebook’s ads teams. These are my thoughts and are not the official position of Facebook. **

From my understanding, conversion tracking tools are really important for direct response ads (or demand fulfillment ads) such as Google AdWords. G

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Posted on Thursday, 22nd September 2011 by Jesse Walker

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Tags: Jobs
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Posted on Saturday, 27th August 2011 by Jesse Walker

In HY2011, FMO provided financing totaling EUR 342 million to businesses in developing countries – up more than EUR 100 million from HY2010′s EUR 234 million in new investments – helping the private sector create jobs, and strengthen sectors essential for sustainable growth in developing countries, such as the energy, housing, financial and agricultural sectors. 55% was invested in low-income countries.

Nanno Kleiterp, FMO’s CEO, said: “We are satisfied with the results of the first half of 2011, which have proved once again that the investment opportunities in developing countries are good. Despite the challenging times in the eurozone and the US, we see that the steady growth in emerging markets and developing countries continues.

FMO sees many good and professionally managed businesses in developing countries that are successful. Read more…

Tags: Bank Fmo, Fmo
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Posted on Friday, 26th August 2011 by Jesse Walker

New ACCC chief Rod Sims.

AUSTRALIA’S competition watchdog will not be deterred by last week’s loss in the Federal Court and will instead launch even more ambitious enforcement cases that test the limits of consumer law.

Speaking just days after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission lost a legal fight against Metcash’s acquisition of rival supermarket chain Franklins, new ACCC chairman Rod Sims said his organisation would not be intimidated by the prospect of spending more time in the courts.

The ACCC was ordered to pay Metcash’s legal costs on Thursday, after Justice Arthur Emmett deemed the $215 million acquisition would not harm competition in the supermarket sector.

The loss could be heavier than first thought for the ACCC, with Metcash believed to be considering an application for higher-than-usual costs known as indemnity costs.

But in one of his first major speeches since becoming chairman, Mr Sims said the ACCC would not be scared away from seeking to prevent acquisitions that substantially lessened competition.

”We will not be swayed from fulfilling that mandate by any potential increase in the prospect of litigation,” he said.

Mr Sims said he wanted the ACCC to test the outer limits of consumer law by pursuing cases in which it had a greater chance of failure.

”The ACCC’s success rate in first-instance litigation stands at almost 100 per cent.

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Tags: Accc
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Posted on Friday, 26th August 2011 by Jesse Walker

The essence of marketing is to understand the needs and wants of your customers and develop a marketing plan that surrounds those requirements. Developing and implementing strong marketing strategies is one of the most effective way to grow and expand your small business. However, using old and outdated marketing tactics can do more harm than good to your small business. You need to discover new marketing rules and use innovative marketing tactics to attract new clients and boost sales.

Using marketing tactics, such as advertising, postcards, e mail marketing, mass mailing, websites, article marketing and blogging, can put your small business growth on autopilot. Also, you may offer free sample of your product to boost your marketing efforts. Small business owners on a tight budget usually have limited funds to allocate to their marketing efforts. Here three cost effective small business marketing strategies:

Focus on Your Target Market: Always keep in mind the importance of niche marketing. Read more…

Tags: Marketing Strategies, Strategies
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Posted on Friday, 26th August 2011 by James Martin

Small business owners are often burdened and distracted from essential tasks (ie. getting new business, talking to clients) by business admin, online marketing and IT hassle in their office. This leads to very poor business performance and business failure.

Today many virtual services and cloud software vendors aim to eliminate these dangers, but most of the time fall short because they only address a small part of the underlying problem. Leaving the business owner to find solutions for the rest of their admin problems which means they are, essentially, back to square one.

WinWeb has known this for a long time, its products and services already can eliminate most of the admin, marketing & IT issues small business owners face on a daily basis.

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Tags: Office, Office Manager
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Posted on Thursday, 25th August 2011 by James Martin

If you have a business that depends on the web for constant revenue, one key problem is turning an impersonal visit over the internet into a sale. In other words, ultimate success is achieved only when web entrepreneurs can break the cycle of anonymous surfing and connect to the customer.

How do you interact with potential buyers and at least begin the process of developing a personal relationship with your potential buyers who would like your help?

First lets look at what used to work well.  Email newsletters.

Im not saying to forget about them but lets recognize whats going on with email newsletters today: most email communications dont even get opened.

If opened, they may be effective, but even a 15,000 person email list may generate little revenue. If all the people expect is a sales pitch well AFTER their buying urgency ended, then the odds of a sale being made later  - if one hadnt been made initally decrease substantially.

That assumes, of course, someone even SUBSCRIBES to your newsletter. Pe

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Tags: Business
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Posted on Thursday, 25th August 2011 by Jesse Walker

RBI raised the policy rates by 25/50 basis points. This is the most familiar statement in media for last couple of months. The role of RBI seems to have increased recently since India started experiencing major inflationary pressure on her economy.

What exactly RBI intends to achieve by raising policy rates, also known as repo and reverse repo rate. We will make some sense of these moves by RBI and discuss the implication of it.

Monetary function

One of the functions of RBI is monetary policy structuring and implementation. The core focus of monetary policy is to increase or reduce the money supply in the market. The only way to do it is to increase or reduce the repo and reverse repo rate. Repo rate is the rate at which banks borrow money from RBI and reverse repo is the rate at which RBI borrows money from the bank.

Now what does RBI intend to achieve by changing these rates.

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Tags: Policy Rates, Rates
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