Business Plans

[Ben Rogers]

Yeah I see what you're getting at now.

I need to see it from the customer's point of view in that they might want it fixed regardless of how much it will cost in relation to how much the machine is worth.

I now have X@mydomainname.com working that forwards to my gmail account that is my main e-mail account so it is getting there, slowly.

[Disturbedguy]

Ben, you still have the search box on some pages.

If you use the links at the bottom it still displays the search box.

[golwg]

As i stated before, see what others offer, get as much advice as possible, plan what you intend to offer and then be a good PC guy. Treat people as you would want to be treated.

[Ben Rogers]

It sounds unprofessional as a genuine company that doesnt rip the customers off does not need to tell them, and "we are genuine and do not rip customers off." immediately makes me think otherwise.

I'm not saying its a bad thing, just the way it is worded sounds unprofessional. In the example you gave it may be that the customer still wants it to be fixed, it's up to the customer in the end, all you can do is let them know the price and time to fix.

I have taken that kind of stuff out of the site now because I understand how it doesn't sound good. I just know what companies around here can be like and charge well over the odds for barely any work needing doing and fixing computers behond repair - at least behond repair for me but I see it differently now.

[SammEl]

How does it sound unprofessional?

It takes time and money to travel to the customer's location as I live in the middle of no where so I need to charge something to look at a computer in need of repair just to cover the basic cost of fuel for a starter and then there is time to consider.

You should just charge a standard fee for inspecting a computer, it's just better.

I think me offering not to fix it if the job is infeasible to do so is actually a professional way to go about it (and I refund the £10 inspection fee) so I will be out of pocket but at least I will not be ripping customers off. If they're laptop is worth £75 and it needs a new motherboard that costs £120 just to buy the component then IMO, it isn't in the customer's best interests to get it fixed when they would be better off getting a new laptop.

You have to remember this is a business your going to be running, you have to try and make the maximum amount of money, but without looking like a rip off merchant.

I will not be opening a shop as I do not have the finances but I will be advertising in the local papers, news letters as well as register with thomson local and the yellow pages as well as having my website on search engines. I may register with BT too so I can get another website with the bt site builder thingy once I have a phone.

If it's just a website and advertising, then I would spend some money on getting a proper website designed my someone or do it yourself but with a professional layout. Your website is ok but it's not as good as other sites when it could easily be as good. Your going to be a tech business, the first thing you need to have is a good looking website.

Your website is too complicated at the moment, it needs an intro of maybe 2-3 lines maximum then you need the links to stand out so people actually click them and see what you offer and what your prices are. The first thing I look at when I visit your site is the links at the bottom of the page, and they arn't yours.

[golwg]

A company where i live charged my mates grandmother a £50 call out fee, and £30 and hour!! The guy spent 2 hours at her house, charging her £110 total as she couldn't get online. When he left she still couldn't get online!! He badly ripped her off and spent most of the time talking to her!

I would say, be honest, be good at your job, be reasonable with your pricing. This will gain you more jobs by word of mouth than any advertisment could do.

[Ben Rogers]

What a rip off merchant! don't know how some people get away with it tbh.

I know my site is a POS compared to most but I am not web designer at all I am more a hardware person and I might get a different template soon, not today though as I have had enough.

Have been doing stuff to the site for hours on end today and it still is bad, some pages dont line up properly when clicked on from certain links and lots more besides, ahh well. At least there is some content there to work with, it's just a case of getting it organised in a more professional manner with a better layout. I will be very reasonable with my pricing, I have pricing on there now and I have removed all of the links that were right at the bottom of every page that linked to older files that were not meant to even be online.

I have spent probably 12 hours on this site in total including SEO work. I have got to 7th on google for "broadband problems bristol" even though I dont cover bristol my mate does, and I link to him. I am also top or just below for most towns in North Devon with similar search terms, albeit with a different URL than I said earlier but it is the same site after all. I was top for "broadband problems devon" the other day.

http://www.google.co.uk/#q=setup+bro...c9946001627c7b - I am 2nd and "broadband problems devon" i am 3rd though that is with my bristol domain name, strangely enough.

Thanks for your help.

[gmarno]

First of all, good luck to you for starting your own business I quit my 9-5 a few years ago to start my own business doing SEO/Web Dev and it was the best thing I've ever done. It's a LOT of hard work and stress, but you get out what you put in.

Be careful using the same site content across multiple domains. At best, Google will just list one domain in the index (and it may be one you don't want in there), but at worst they could penalise you for duplicate content. If you must have multiple domains, put unique content on each.

However, most importantly I think you need to REALLY rethink your SEO strategy. I've had a quick look at the code on your site(s) and you have stuff on there which is in ban hammer territory. Hidden text links, keyword spamming etc are a great way to get struck out of Googles index so I'd strongly advise you remove them asap. You'll probably get away with it for a month or two, and it will appear that you're doing a great job on the SEO. But in 2-3 months, your sites will literally disappear from the index and I'll tell you now, it's a hard slog getting back to the top.

My #1 tip for websites: Content is king. Keep it simple (both design and content), keep it informative and keep it accessible (i.e. not much tech speak).

Once again, good luck

[Ben Rogers]

Yeah I have removed what you meantioned, it was only for a few days while my sitemaps were set to hourly but I dont even know if this matters.

I have removed the hidden words though lol, it got me well good key word density I tell you tho, and I know ur not allowed to do it, hence why i have gotten rid of such turd.

My index.html actually has a good meta tag analysis with the analyzer to my suprise but other pages need new description and key words due to how much I have changed every page today.

One domain has 12 indexed pages on google, another has 2 indexed and the other 3 so far have zero indexed.

Thanks

[gmarno]

Definitely looking better from an SEO point, but you're still keyword spamming on your alt tags and lowsrc tags. Keyword spamming alt tags doesn't work (anymore), and it's just something else for the search engines to penalise you for.

You can certainly use these kinds of techniques to get your site to the top of Google for short periods of time (2-3 months), but if you want lasting results you need to play to their rules. Your competitors will stick the knife in if you give them a chance, and Google can be surprisingly quick when they see someone blatantly flouting the rules.

I would seriously suggest you check out some recent SEO articles, things have REALLY moved on over the last 5 years.

[golwg]

What about going to someone like One&One and paying for a template website where you can add all your own stuff etc etc? Wouldn't that be easier / cheaper?

[Ben Rogers]

The template would probably be the same principle tbh, just editing it to suit you're own requirements.

I have only recently learned SEO and I honestly had no idea that alt tags in images that had keywords that breaking any rules at all, seriously. But I will remove them if this is the case.

I will also be optimising the pages for their new content today.

My freind owns bristolcomputing.com and I own the .co.uk varient.

He says why isn't his site on google when he doesn't even do the meta tags properly or anything. I pay for his domain (he pays zero) and let him use it for free and I link to him on every page under partners on my site and he still has a go at me asking why my site is on google for bristol stuff and his isn't.

I might just edit the name servers to what I use and use it myself as he's acting like a complete x.

[golwg]

Not fair on you him being a greedy guy. He should realise what you are doing for him. I would kick him into touch and go alone.

[Ben Rogers]

Yeah I know, he lives in Bristol though which is a good 2 hour drive from here with no traffic.

We did the same course at college together and he's meant to be a mate. I will keep the domain pointing at his site for now at least, but if he gets on my wick again about this stuff I will be using the domain myself and he can pay for his own which will be hard as he has no credit/debit card!

Yesterday I had 844 page views for my site but only 43 were absolute unique visitors according to google's analytics and a total of 3441 page views since I created it, from 1st Feb till today.

My bristolcomputing.co.uk domain has had 397 page views since I linked it to my site on the 23rd Feb but 281 of those were yesterday.

I am not sure if analytics is getting the highest figure and counting it as a total for all my domains listed in the account though.

[peterb]

A company where i live charged my mates grandmother a £50 call out fee, and £30 and hour!! The guy spent 2 hours at her house, charging her £110 total as she couldn't get online. When he left she still couldn't get online!! He badly ripped her off and spent most of the time talking to her!

What a rip off merchant! don't know how some people get away with it tbh.

Pricing jobs is very difficult! While I would say that the call out fee is excessive in the case quoted, I don't think the hourly rate is - given that it includes time, your expertise, an element of risk for warranty claims - although at that charge I'd expect the problem to be solved.

For costing, you have two basic options - a cost/unit time, or a fixed price based on your estimate of the job.

The latter is more attractive to the customer, but riskier for you. You need to assess the job first, cost any hardware, with an appropriate mark-up, and make an estimate for the time to complete. If the time over-runs, you are not actually losing anything, apart from your cost/hour. If you find you need more parts, you either absorb the cost, or re-negotiate with the customer (and risk losing goodwill - unless you have something in writing that states that emerging work may be charged extra - essentially a contract.

If you charge on a time basis, then you need to be seen to be delivering value for money (ie, working for the time specified - and pondering the solution might not be seen as working. You also need to consider what increments you charge - 30 minutes, 12 minutes (1/5 hr) or whatever.

A variant combining both models is to charge an inspection fee (which might include "up to 30 minutes work" - but state it - in a contract or written terms) and then prepare a firm quote based on your inspection. But again you need to consider all the spects in your quote - warranty, (how long) returns if an item you supply fails (sale of goods act if it is a private customer) professional liability (if something you repaired subsequently catches fire for example - even if it wasn't something you did) which all go into your overheads - and therefore your chargeable rate.

You can buy professional Indemnity Insurance - (and I would strongly recommend it) - but it is another overhead.

If you provide services to another business, things like sale of goods act may not apply, but you may then be into written contracts. I have mentioned contracts or written statement of terms - it is a good idea (whether a business customer or a private one) to have an agreed statement of work (or contract) in place before you start the work. It protects both you and the customer and can prevent later (possibly acrimonious) misunderstandings later on. Not all jobs will go smoothly.

[Ben Rogers]

Yeah the hourly rate is not too bad though I'd expect between £20 and £25 an hour standard but the £50 call out charge is insane, that was my point that I didn't express correctly and I was also expressing anger towards the fact that she had to pay that sum of money when the guy didn't even fix the problem which is not on IMO.

I am doing a fixed price for different jobs labour wise, and the cost of the parts will be the same for me as the customer pays.

My cost for data transfer to DVD is £20 at a fixed cost for any amount of data but the DVDs the customer pays for. Computer MOT I charge £15 to clean the computer inside and out, removing dust from fans, checking it is running smoothly, has no viruses, upto date with all updates, all drivers installed etc and that is is operating as it should. I charge £20 for upgrading memory and £20 for upgrading a hard drive (if it is for a data drive, not OS) if OS needs installing then it is obviously more - £50 for a re-installation of OS including all driver installations, updates and install of anti-virus software or £40 for the same as above if they do not have the product key or CD that I will purchase and charge on top.

I charge £60 for installing broadband, providing they have the equipment and parts on top if they don't, for home customers that is and I haven't mentioned business broadband installation costs as there could be a lot more to it. To setup a peer-to-peer network for upto 10 PCs I charge £50 and to setup a domain, providing the business has a server OS installed and to setup upto 19 client machines I charge £125 which I think is very reasonable, to say the least.

I have not taken into account any cost of travel which could be considerable due to my location in the middle of no where, quite litterally and I will be making a terms and conditions page very shortly stating certain points that could occur with certain jobs.

I know the pricing for simple stuff is ott but I have to get to the location for starters and take time into consideration and make something out of it.

If I fitted a PSU to a customer's machine and it caught fire would this not be covered by public liability insurance or is that only if someone is injured and has nothing to do with computer components? or if the PSU took out most of the computer parts what would happen? There is no way I would have to replace all the parts free of charge if the PSU was up to the job and I always get suitable quality and wattage PSUs and use a multimetre to test rails when under load with Orthos to make sure they're within tollerance but if a fan fails in the PSU and it overheats it this is another matter all togehter and I can't do anything much to test for this occurance.

I have written a sentence "Below are our estimate costs for each job. If additional work occurs then prices may vary" on my price pages (2) as there is no way I can guarantee the price.