Time for Doctors to Build an Up-to-Date Website

Thanks to internet as now you have the opportunity of penetrating within distribution channels, reaching the market segments and making a strong, efficient and cost effective impact on the image of your company and the product or service you offer.

With approximately 970 million internet users around the world, proportioning to 15% of its population, internet marketing has been the most beneficial way of getting potential customers from all over the world into your intended perspective. While internet being an amazing communication medium, a well designed and maintained website enables you to formulate your identity and creates a global presence by exhibiting your business on the World Wide Web.

With the popularity of your websites, you are bound to meet enormous competition as your prospective customers constantly compare before buying your products or engaging your services and therefore it is vital that your website is well constructed and up to date. Thus creative web designing and web promotions play a large role in connecting people and sustaining consumer interests. Search Engine Optimization alias SEO is also a mandatory concern when creating a website to meet its intended use of being visited regularly, as the technique ensures that potential customers are inclined to know more about the site when being searched via search engines.

What are the benefits of a Website for a Doctor?

Doctors need a website for many reasons. The most important reason is that patients search and find out information about them over the internet. A Pew Internet Project Survey carried on during May 2005 (http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2005/PIP_Healthtopics_May05.pdf.pdf) found that 28% of the internet users around the world search about their doctors online. Therefore the use of internet and websites has become an essential tool for healthcare providers in order to attract new patients, educate them while increasing office efficiency. This is evident by the research analysis carried out by Jupiter Research which states that websites are a venue for physicians delivering trusted content and physician capabilities.

Growth of the internet has simply made it easy and effective for patients to check online and make appointments with doctors within their region. This has brought the need for doctors to market themselves and their services over the internet in their own website. For an example if you are a physician based in New York, just one more new patient who searches on the net and interested in consulting you can lead to an increase in your profits. Also it should be important that your name shows up top in the list when a patient searches for a physician in New York through a search engine, like Google, Yahoo! or Live. This could be done effectively by investing on a proper website designing, maintenance and search engine optimization.

Though an own practice carried out by doctors give them their flexibility and financial freedom, it is always important for each individual doctors to make themselves different from others and become more lucrative. They should build their own strong competitive advantage and a brand image, over the others providing the same service in the same region using latest resources and marketing tools.

Being visible on the internet builds name and branding awareness, which creates opportunities to appear on mass media including television, radio and newsprint interviews and etc. This would promote you amongst patients from all over the world and nationwide including celebrities, high paying clients and educated patients.

A good website of a doctor will,

• Be user friendly and easy to understand by various segments of patients
• Informational and prospective for patients viewing
• Get some tasks done online, like scheduling an appointment
• Provide solutions for common and repetitive queries of patients
• Be up to date and provide accurate information for current and potential customers
• Include training, patient testimonials, research & publications and contact information
• Provide other office management information including staff biographies and credentials, office hours, maps and directions to location, printable versions of forms, links to insurance providers, information about what patients should bring during their first consultation and list of services

But remember that internet positive patients are significantly different from the normal average patients visiting your practice currently, as they are well-informed, used to getting second opinions and can be quite demanding. They are affluent and know exactly what they want to the point. Therefore your website would also be an excellent form of continuing medical education for yourself while understanding different patterns and lifestyle of patients. Also your website should be up to date all the time, not just with the information provided and also the web technology used.

Market Boost for Virtual Assistants over Regular Employees

With an economy which is growing worse day by day; most employers around the world are looking for various alternatives to save money and cut down unnecessary costs. An important component considered during this process is cutting down the labor costs, which is a major chunk in the costs incurred by an organization.

How?

By the use advanced technology and communication techniques, it has become very easy and more effective to cut down and save the costs incurred on the regular full time based employees.

The solution is to hire and engage a Virtual Assistant!

Changes are always hard to implement and maintain but if you gain more by adapting to it, then Why Not Try It?

Advantages

There some significant advantages as to why employers increasingly opt for Virtual Assistants.

When considering the cost, it is always comparatively expensive to hire a regular full time employee, than engaging a Virtual Assistant. According to the Virtual Assistant Networking forum VA Networking, a full time employee is paid $20 per hour with 35% of that is incurred in the form of fringe benefits while an extra 50% incurred as additional factory overheads, adding up to a total cost of $37 per hour, whereas a Virtual Assistant is only paid an average of $35 per hour.

As a contradiction to the traditional belief “cheap things are not good“, Virtual Assistants are cheap but that does not affect their work efficiency. Comparing the number of hours worked per annum, full time employees consume around 2080 hours, while Virtual Assistants take only 480 hours which is less than 25% an employee consume to work on the same task. in point of fact, with both high cost and poor efficiency, the full time employees are still paid $76 960/annum while Virtual Assistants are only paid $16 800, which is 78% less costly to perform the same task and the importance is, it helps you greatly for COST CUTTING.

Apart from the above, various other expenditures are also involved in employing a full time employee which could be saved by hiring a VA. For instance, employers are liable to pay various forms of taxes such as unemployment tax and incur expenses. As examples, consider the EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) and the ETF (Employees’ Trust Fund). In the case of Virtual Assistants, as their services are tax deductible, it enables you to save costs in two easy ways.

Another issue regarding full time employees is the training processes which are required for employees to perform tasks whenever they have to perform work which is out of their usual scope and this incurs an additional cost for the employer. When it comes to Virtual Assistants, you could hire the expertise in the field you are looking for and just pay for the hours they work on your task and not a cent more.

The cost is also saved by a lot of other ways. For example, regular breaks are provided to the full time onsite employees during their work hours for tea/coffee, lunch, roaming around and surfing on the internet. Nnone of these are claimed by the Virtual Assistants who are 100% focussed on your tasks during the hours you hire them. Certain usual habits of full time employees such as regular socialising, responding to personal phone calls and emails and prolonged internet surfing make it unproductive to the company they work for. As an employer, you don’t want to waste money. To get rid of these worries, the best option available is to hire a Virtual Assistant.

Simply put, you’ll pay only for the hours worked and not for any wasted time. You could also save on the additional benefits provided to your full time employees such as paid vacations, annual bonuses and allowances, as none of these are incurred in the case of a Virtual Assistant where you don’t even have to pay for the resources used.

After getting to know all the benefits, intelligent employers would soon be switching to Virtual Assistants to boost their businesses through cost cutting and time saving they are offered.

	Full Time Employees		Virtual Assistant
Cost /Hour	Average Hourly Rate	$ 20.00	Pay at the rate of $ 35.00 per hour Save up to $ 2.00 every hour
	Fringe Benefits of 35% (Health, Insurance, Retirement Plans etc.)	Up to $ 7.00
	Overheads of 50%	Up to $ 10.00
	TOTAL	$ 37.00/hour
Effectiveness	Maximum of 2 080 hours/annum		480 hours/annum Completing tasks more effectively, within less than 25% of the time consumed
Total Labour Cost	$ 76 960/annum		$ 16 800/annum Save up to 78% spent on Labours
Tax & Other Expenses	Liable to pay all related taxes including EPF, ETF and Unemployment taxes		Tax Deductible Cost Savings
Training	Extra cost incurred for training process while salary being paid regularly		Talented and know-how professionals equipped with experience, education and up to date technology No Training Required
Breaks	Coffee breaks, Lunch breaks, Spacing out, Surfing during work and lot more during the hours being paid		100% focussed on the business and related tasks Only Pay for the no. Of hours worked
Unproductive & Costly Habits of employees	v  Frequent socializingv  Running personal errands v  Prolonged Internet Surfing v  Late to arrive/early to leave v  Personal phone calls and emails		None Focussed on your tasks & paid for the work done, nothing in addition
Additional Benefits	Annual bonuses, Allowances, Office Space, Furniture, Equipments, Paid Vacations and lot more		None Only Paid for the time consumed and not for resources

Magento vs. OsCommerce

Before the release of Magento E-Commerce, OsCommerce was one of the leading and popular open sourced e-commerce solutions for the online business developers. Though the release of the ecommerce platform was late and comparatively more sophisticated to use, Magento includes all the best features from OsCommerce, such as having a strong community and being an open source.

SPEED

Despite the fact that Magento is currently superior to OsCommerce with advanced features and options it needs dedicated servers from a particular hosting provider to build a fast running online store and not just a shared web hosting account, which would be enough to run an online store on OsCommerce faster. This is because unlike OsCommerce, Magento is very resource intensive and needs a highly specified dedicated server.

EASE OF USE

Some opt for OsCommerce simply because it’s easy to use and modify whereas Magento is more technical and better for web developers rather than shop owners. But the fact is that Magento is ecommerce platform which is really easy to install, manage and use if you know how to do it properly. Another advantage in Magento is that it is regularly improved and updated, whereas OsCommerce is old and does not surprise its owners with new updates.

FEATURES & UPGRADES

Magento is also known for being the easily customizable open source software with a range of new and improved features being updated routinely. Magento is also superior to OsCommerce in the useful features it has, such as programming structure and frequency of project code updates. The software itself is very easy to upgrade, which enables you to update within a very few minutes without going through a list of codes, while having the web store running online. Apart from all the features on OsCommerce, Magento also includes many of the add-on modules requested by most of the ecommerce platform users.

Unique features which attract web designers towards Magento includes,

• Multi site functionality, which suits the shop owners with more than one online store built to target on different group of customers and not just one. This also makes it easy to manage the site with handling all the orders and customers at the same place.
• One Page Checkout
• Smooth integration with third party applications
• Abandoned shopping cart, product, customer statistics and product comparisons
• Layered Navigation enables drilling down through a large product range using a series of useful features which gives a better online shopping experience to the customer
• Shipping estimator in shopping cart without the need for logging in
• Order editing and editable order emails
• Live Currency updates with the current exchange rate in the market
• Reporting with breakdowns of shipping, tax, refunds and coupons, which can be customized (e.g. by date) and exported to Microsoft Excel for future reference. In the case of Multi Site Functionality reports could be generated individually or for the business as a whole
• Integration with Google Analytics and Ad words to promote the site with the facility to generate Google Sitemaps which helps in indexing the website effectively on search engines

Reference:

http://www.design4magento.com/magento-reviews/magento-vs-oscommerce/

http://www.itwebexperts.com/advantages-magento-vs-oscommerce-conversion-site.php

http://www.limesharp.net/blog/2008/11/10-things-we-love-about-magento/

THE BCG MATRIX

The BCG Matrix was created by Bruce Henderson for the Boston Consulting Group in 1970 in order to help businesses with analysing their product units and lines based on their market share and the growth rate of the market. This chart is also known as B.C.G Analysis, Boston Box, Boston Matrix and Boston Consulting Group Analysis. BCG Matrix helps the company to allocate resources for production and also to use it as an analytical tool for brand marketing, strategic management and production management.

Soon after the matrix was created in the early 1970s, it became a well known portfolio management decision making tool. The concept was based on prioritising the products based on the Product Life Cycle Theory.

Products are classified into 4 different groups according to the BCG Matrix. A scatter graph representing the rankings of products based on the relative market share and growth rates would ease the process of classification.

The four different groups are listed below,

• CASH COWS: This group represent the products with a high market share in a slowly growing industry, which results in an overall profit and acts as the foundation for the company. Every corporation would opt for products which are Cash Cows as they are in the maturity stage of their respective Product Life Cycle. These Cash Cows should be milked with a low level of investment as the market has a very low growth rate.
• DOGS: Represents the products in a low market share with a slow market growth rate. These products barely generate profits and break even so that there is enough cash to maintain the business’s market share. Usually companies continue with this production of “dogs” in order to assist their other business units, though it should be shut down in the long run.
• QUESTION MARKS: Known as Problem Child, this represent the group of products which have a higher market growth rate with a low market share owned by the company. Though this rapidly growing market sector consumes more cash in the form of research and development, the cash generated would not be enough to due to the lower market shares. These products can possibly become a Star by gaining more market share or a Cash Cow when the market growth slows. Therefore this should be analysed carefully to determine whether they worth the investment to gain more market share.
• STARS: The product units with a high market share in a fast growing industry. These products would require a large amount of cash to maintain the market leader position with a high level of profits. When the market growth slows Stars would become a Cash Cows if the company remains as the market leader and if not it would end up becoming DOGS.

The natural cycle of any product is to start as a Question Mark and turn into a Star. As a particular industry matures the market growth rate will slow and it becomes a Cash Cow and finally turns into a Dog.

The purpose of such ranking is to help analysts in deciding which of their business units to fund and how much and which business to discontinue. Necessary precautions should be taken as high market share and market growth individually is not the only consideration. It is important for a company to achieve a balance within the four different categories considering Porter’s Five Forces model.

WHY VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS???

Dont waste your TIME & MONEY anymore...

Virtual assistants or VAs refer to the self employed professionals providing administrative, creative and technical related assistance to their clients remotely via internet, email, call-conferencing and fax. Usually Virtual assistants cater secretarial and business support for small, middle scale businesses, large corporations and consultancy groups based all over the world. Being a growing entrepreneurial opportunity, companies and individuals providing these services are growing day by day, especially in the countries with a centralised economy.

The concept of providing assistance virtually is well appreciated globally and specially by the companies seeking to eliminate unwanted expenses and implement cost cutting due to the recession faced by most of the developed countries all over. Engaging a Virtual assistant won’t only result in cost cutting, it also gives the flexibility to choose the best provider for the service you seek to outsource via the reviews and testimonials written by their past and existing clients. Virtual assistants also help to save a large chunk of fund spent on the overhead every year; as such provider will be using his own assets, such as computer and workspace on his own expense, which won’t impact you at all. Most of the Virtual assistants work on a contract basis that last for few weeks to years, giving an opportunity to review the quality of service provided.

How does a Virtual Assistant differ from a traditional employee or a temporary worker?

· A traditional worker is an employee, managed and supervised by the company within the company premises itself. This employee will be paid by the company on a monthly or weekly basis with incurring a part of the overhead paid by the company for that period.

· A temporary worker is an employee of a Staffing agency who is hired by the company to provide a service within its premises. Though such employees are not paid by the company, they incur a part of its overhead and will be salaried by the staffing agency, which is paid by the company for a given period of time on a regular basis.

· A Virtual Assistant is an independently contracted provider of services and not an employee working for the company within its premises. They are freelance individuals working at their own premises, managing the work from their clients with their own operating policies and standards, which would effectively result in no more supervision, no more managing, no more hassles, no more running out of time and especially no more additional overheads. Virtual assistants make you even more cost effective as you will be charged only for their time worked on your particular task and are tax deductible as they are independent contractors.

Though Virtual assistants work for a number of clients with different tasks, the services offered to each of them are specific in order to provide a high quality of service, which will enable the clients to focus more on the core objective of their business effectively and not on the general time consuming day to day administrative work. Almost all tasks carried out within an office can be completed by Virtual assistants more effectively and efficiently. These tasks include bookkeeping, market research, content writing, data processing, web designing, desktop publishing, data entry, payroll services, online research, remote assistance and search engine optimisation. Why waste time doing these? Sit back, relax and enjoy a better result by outsourcing them to VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS!!!

Porter’s Five Forces Model

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis is a structure developed by Micheal E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979. This mainly aims to analyze the industry and the factors involved within along with its impact on the business.

All these five forces take different key factors of a business into consideration, such as market structure, competition and threats with regard to innovation and technological development, which could also give rise to various different opportunities. Though such different factors considered, the main objective and the target of using such a model is to increase profitability by gaining a market share. This could be achieved by individual firms applying their core competences to stand above others and achieve a target above the industrial average. Airline Industry could be a best example, where individual entities apply their unique model and strategies to distinguish themselves from others.

The Five Forces model is widely used to during the initial stages of strategy formulation in order to identify and understand the factors. Those five factors are,

• · Threat of substitutes

• · Threat of new entrants

• · Existing Industrial Rivalry

• · Supplier bargaining power

• · Customer bargaining power

Threat of substitutes shows how substitutes can impact on your products. For an instance availability of a very similar substitute may always give an option to the customer to switch and that gives you the continuous responsibility to try and retain that customer from switching throughout by considering factors, such as price, quality, switching cost, offers and the buyers propensity to substitute.

Threat of new entrants would always increase the competition within the market fighting for the market share. When there’s a very profitable industry, large number of players will compete which will eventually result in a decline. Effectively there would be only few players who manage to survive and remain in the market. Factors like barriers to entry, like high capital cost and access to distribution channel could be considered under this category.

In most cases, the existing rivalry determines the competitiveness within an industry. Number of different strategies could be used to achieve this, such as low pricing, innovation and aggressive marketing techniques. Rate of industrial growth, number of competitors and economies of scale could be considered as the key factors under this category.

The bargaining power of customer determines how sensitivity of the business to their customers. Factors like substitutes, price buyer volume could be considered under this.

Suppliers are also more powerful in some cases, especially where the number is limited. Quality products and the availability of other suppliers and their accessibility could be considered under this criterion.

Why doesn’t your website hold the #1 ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?

Search engines are the one and only widely known online source providing access to millions of websites to the internet users around the world. Though only some search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, Dog Pile and Ask.com are used widely by people, there are number of other engines available. The adverse usage of such search engines are evident from the researches carried out in various localities in various time periods, such as Forrester research in July 2005, showing over a 80% of internet users reach sites via the search engines. This clearly explains why the website holders try their level best to rank their webpage high beyond other SERPs available.

How can we do this? How can we rank our website first among billions and billions of other websites available? SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION gives the solution for this.

What is Search Engine Optimization alias SEO? This is all about the techniques used to optimize your webpage in a way that the search engines can easily recognize your site amongst the others with regard to a related keyword or phrase search. This can be achieved by including the keywords used by millions of searchers who are interested in finding out information on the business or service you are into. For instance, Nokia could use a series of keywords such as Nokia, mobile, cellular, phones and even their individual model numbers such as 6300, so that when someone searches for 6300 on a search engine the homepage of Nokia, http://www.nokia.com would appear first on the SERP. Though the optimization priorities vary from search engine to search engine, including the best set of keywords on the website in the right place would give a reasonable ranking for a related search query.

Keywords could be included in a website diversely ranging from the domain name, title, Meta tag, Meta keywords, headings, sub-headings to the content of the webpage showing the importance of the Search Engine Optimization techniques being included in the designing stage of the webpage itself. Though the web designers usually don’t take the optimization process into consideration, it’s very advisable to build the site with a professional SEOs consultation. A range of software available in the market, such as Internet Business Promoter and Word tracker could also help you with the optimizing process by making it easier.

There are some website holders who use some of the unethical black SEO techniques to list their websites top amongst other SERPs, which finally ends up with their website being blocked permanently by search engines and will not get listed in the SERPs anymore, such as usage of keywords excessively. Though it gives the identity to the website, it should not exceed an optimum level. The optimum level of keyword density allowed by most of the famous search engines is 1% to 3%. For instance, if the allowed keyword density is 5%, the keyword could be used five times in a text of 100 words. Keyword stuffing is also another black SEO technique, where the same keyword is repeated several times in the Meta tag of the website.

Existence of such unethical methods of SEO itself shows that the process of Search Engine Optimization is tough, but still by working on the right way day by day, you can make your website be the first in all available search engines throughout.

How successful is Just-in-time?

Just in time is a strategy or philosophy followed by companies in order to manage their inventory stock holding by eliminating all waste efficiently and effectively resulting in a comparatively higher return on investment to the shareholders. The term “waste” above refers to the activities which increase the cost without adding any value to the final product thus the business. Such activities would include accumulation of excess inventory, unnecessary movement of materials, cost on obsolescent materials and cost incurred due to reworking on faulty products. JIT should not only eliminate such costs but should also be able to manage costs arising from the high delivery lead time, number of machine setups and handling machine breakdowns. Therefore any costs eliminated due to on time inventory management should be invested in getting the right thing at the right time to the right place.

JIT was initially introduced by Toyota Japan in mid 1950s and was known as the Toyota Production System. Later JIT was adopted by many Japanese factories by early 1970s and was established in most of the US firms by 1980s and became the hot topic in well known businesses around the world like Dell Computers, where the customer orders are made online and the production is done according to their configuration and delivered at their doorsteps.

Though JIT sounds different, it also has its own drawbacks. The major problem is that the company has to depend totally on the supplier for the no time delivery and the quality of such materials being delivered. If not that could lead into various problems such as delivery delays and poor quality of end products. For that reason Toyota has two different suppliers delivering most of the assemblies and maintains a good relationship with those entities. Maintaining a good relationship with suppliers is vital as JIT makes the company more dependent on suppliers for quality and on time delivery. JIT also results in same products being ordered several times based on orders from different clients, which may result in not receiving bulk trade discounts by purchasing at the same time.

Therefore its evident JIT has both its pros and cons, but still large companies like Toyota following it over time have proven the success behind such concepts.

What is Intellectual Capital all about?

When some companies go public they would acquire a capital injection which they wouldn’t have expected. For instance when Netscape, an American Computer Service company well known for its web browsers, went public in 1995, it was a just a $17 million company with less than 50 employees. However, just after the first day of trading, the Stock exchange valued the company at $3 Billion, which is 175 times more than the tangible present value of the entity at the time.

What makes the investors as a whole to make such a large injection? This is where the Intellectual capital comes in to play.

Intellectual Capital is about the off balance sheet assets held by an entity. It includes the skills and expertise of the employees in the company and the hierarchical structure within the company, helping it to build up a competitive advantage over the other players in the market. This is evident by the value generated from the brand name, trademarks and patents of the entity.

Intellectual capital includes the following two components:

· Human capital

· Structural capital

The capabilities of employees along with their innovativeness and creativity are considered as the Human capital, while the infrastructure of human capital including the organizational capabilities to meet market requirements are considered as the Structural capital.

Customers also play a vital role in such value creation as the success of the business mainly depends on customer satisfaction. For instance, when Ford Motor’s customer loyalty increases by just a percentage it means that the overall profit of Ford increases by $100 million. It’s not just the customers, even suppliers and consultants can add value to the entity’s intellectual capital in the form of quality and standard of service provided and their relationship with the company. Market conditions such as the future forecasts of the demand and supply expected will also impact the intellectual capital to an extent.

Intellectual capital is more useful to companies that are knowledge intensive and highly technical. Lester C. Thurow, author of The Future of Capitalism says “the era of brainpower industries is causing a fundamental shakeup in classical capitalism as the strategic assets are the brains of employees”. Such assets help to add credibility to the company in the stock market giving confidence to shareholders assuring continuous growth over time encouraging them to invest.

Now it’s very clear that the value of the company cannot be measured just by the numerical figures stated in the financial statements but is a lot more than that, involving the non financial factors and assets including the value expected to be created by the company in the future.

The time has come to make OFR statutory!!!

Operating and Financial Review alias OFR is a famous topic going on amongst investors currently, specially due to the financial crisis and credit crunch resulting in the recession faced by the developed countries.

What is an OFR?

An OFR is a statement which gives an unbiased, understandable, true and fair assessment of the business and its operations directly from the board of directors of the company. The report also evaluates the profitability and peformance of the current operations carried out by the company, along with the possible new investments and expansions in the future. The statement comes out as an attachment with the annual financial statement giving a qualitative view of the company to the interested stakeholders.

The definition of an OFR itself makes the current need for the statement obvious, “to build up the lost confidence in the business once again”. The Companies House of UK has set guidelines to prepare OFR, though it’s not made mandatory or statutory. This simply give the freedom to the risk facing companies not to attach an OFR and be safe from the negative impact in capital injection through both equity and debt.

It would be advisible to maake such statements statutory as all companies would be bound to prepare it annually with an unbiased view. For an example, the continous banks failures in USA.  Such issues occur due to the freedom given to the Directors and the operational level to take their own decisions, which finally impacts on a wider community.

OFR is just an option that should be made statutory, whereas there are lot more qualitative statements apart from the usual income statements and balance sheets which only considers profit as the sole objective. But what now expected by stakeholders is more qualitative, which would build confidence on the long term stability and sustainability of the company.

Anyways it’s going to be a hard task for the companies to build up the confidence and restructure the Wall Street back again with banks of more 100 years history collapsing. Maybe it could be achieved by revealing more information about the company and its operations, where again Companies House and Company Law should play a vital role to save both companies and investors.