August 27, 2010 | Posted by admin
The essentials which go to make up a good business letter may be divided into two classes – mechanical make-up, and contents. Before a letter can come into existence the mechanical side must be attended to. The subject matter may be pertinent and well composed and yet the letter itself be so arranged typo-graphically and so disposed on the page that the unity of the whole is lost.
The display as a whole should balance. Before the stenographer starts the address, calculation should be made as to how many lines the letter will run and as to how it should be disposed on the page. The body of the letter should neither be crowded near the top nor bottom of the sheet, but should be so placed that, viewed in connection with the letter head, it presents a well balanced and artistic effect.
This effect is often underrated, being in fact passed by without a thought by the average stenographer, and the ordinary business man is so busy seeing that his dictation is correctly transcribed that he gives little thought to this essential. Harmony of color effect should be observed. A yellow paper bearing the firm announcement in blue, the letter in green and signed with purple ink is not to be recommended.
Letters blurred in copying and wet from the press or otherwise violating the rule of neatness cannot help but produce an unfavorable impression. Orthography and capitalization, particularly of proper names, should be exact and uniform.
A misspelled word in the body of a letter, particularly if a mere transposition of letters in typewriting, may occasionally slip in and do no particular damage, but the misspelling of the name of the party addressed may lose an order, and cannot help but militate against the general effect of the letter. Neatness uncompromising neatness – that should be the first effect of a letter, giving the idea that the firm putting out the writing is thorough master of the minor (as well as the major) details of its business.
Contents
In letter-writing, contents may be divided into subject matter and expression. The subject matter is, broadly speaking, what the writer says. This should coincide with two other things:
(1) what the writer wants to say, and
(2) what the one addressed wants to know.
Something which is the a b c of life and a mere matter of routine to the writer in a certain line may be abstruse and complicated to a non-technical reader. To avoid an offensive simplicity of language on the one hand and excessive technicality on the other is one of the tests of a good business correspondent. There is a tendency to slight simple questions asked by different inquirers day after day, which must be avoided by putting oneself in the place of the one asking the question, and giving the knowledge for which he is looking.
One of the most, if not the most, important essentials of a good business letter lies in correct expression. The one thing which causes more failures in business correspondence than any other, is the incorporation of personal peculiarities in a letter. There may be called to mind, in fact, more than one established business backed by ample capital, having a broad field and financed by capable and conservative business men, that is at the mercy of a poor correspondent. This is ably expressed by Forrest Crissy, who says:
“So apparent must be the importance of this branch (tact and tone in business letters) of business systematization, that scarcely a word of argument is needed to enforce its necessity. Very recently a large whole-sale merchant said to me:
‘I have recently been obliged to discharge the head of my credit department – my confidential man. He is honest, conservative and shrewd, but recently I have been awakened to the fact that his incapacity to write a letter which does not leave a sting, a chill, or at least a sense of lofty indifference, is hurting my business more than would some downright reckless blunders. When he writes a letter granting a good customer a larger line of credit he gives it a twist that somehow makes that customer wish he hadn’t asked for credit and thus placed himself under added obligations. And if he refuses to meet the request for such a favor the refusal is so put that it seems a studied effort to conceal a strong unwillingness to give any credit at all.
Yet this man has always considered him-self an adept in letter-writing – and for a time he completely hypnotized me into that view. But at last the steady withdrawal of patronage and the occasional out-spoken retorts which his letters provoked forced upon me a recognition of the real condition of affairs. Then I went out after a man who could write a business letter that had just the right ring to it; that was neither so sloppy that it sounded hypocritical or so stiff and stilted that there was no tone of good hearty business friendliness in it.
I have found him. He comes high, but the difference in results is remarkable. Of course, there are other things required than this form of literary ability – that’s what you’d call it. He must have business experience, business judgment and all the other cardinal business virtues; but the addition of this peculiar capacity to write business letters that hit the mark is a rare gift and makes him a star man.’ “
Simplicity and clearness as an element of expression cannot be rated too highly. The saying of a thing in the plain language of the common people, not only adds to the style and dignity of a letter, but has the most vital element of being understandable. As Chas. R. Weirs says, “Eloquence, either real or imaginary, has no place in a business letter.”
Whatever else may be neglected in writing, courtesy should not be slighted. A man may be told nearly anything face to face – it is qualified by the bearing, tone of voice, manner and earnestness of the speaker. A sentence may be given an entirely different meaning by a tone or gesture – it may even be diplomatically changed after partly spoken, to make it conform to the unconscious demand of the listener, and most of all spoken speech is transient. What is written, on the other hand, is put down in black and white to stay. The record is permanent. It can be offered in evidence, can be dug up years afterwards from a musty file, and discourteously written can queer, not only an immediate sale, but the sales of a decade.
Length
Letters often tend to verbosity from the fact that they are dictated instead of written. Were a man to write his letters himself with pen and ink he would study brevity and conciseness of expression, but having letters written for him, he will dictate more than he would write. Brevity is not always desirable. Some people – particularly those receiving few letters – like to receive lengthy correspondence. Getting few letters, they wish those long and newsy.
A letter is an event to some patrons and cannot be too long for a careful perusal. In this class of letters the party ad-dressed may be often appealed to in conversational style; as, “Judge of the goods yourself, Mr. Brown,” “We ask you, Mr. Smith, if we have not treated you fairly?” etc. At the other extreme is the business man, particularly the city business man. To him, brevity to the point of curtness is always welcome. As someone has alliteratively said, the formula for a business letter to a busy man is: Sir: Say it. Stop!
Judging the Other Man’s Letter.
One of the pre-requisites of a good correspondent is the ability, inherent or acquired to judge the general character and status of the writer by means of his letters. Until the last few years the letter-head of a firm was a considerable guide to the standing of the company putting It out, but good printing is now much more common and many one-horse concerns put out conservative, well-gotten-up stationery.
Ability to recognize the efforts of an amateur or schoolboy inquiring for a catalog with no intention of buying and to treat the writer accordingly, call…
Categories: Business Ideas | 
Tags: Business, Elements, Good, Letter | 
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August 17, 2010 | Posted by admin
Letter is a most important way of communication as it conveys your message to the person you want to. But Business letters are formal letters helps to convey your message to your business associate or associates in a very professional manner. There are certain principles that one needs to follow in order to write an effective business letter that creates a positive impact and generates good results from the benefactor. (A person whom we are trying to convey or convince) The some basic things one has to keep in mind while writing a perfect business letter are: – There are some specific rules and regulations for writing a formal Business Letter, which may not be in writing. – The Business Letters should compulsorily be written on the Company’s Letter head to create a positive impression. – Obviously for a formal Business Letter you language must be formal as a sign of respect and gratitude. – The person referred in the Business letter should be addressed by opening words like Dear Mr., or Dear Ms. (Ms. is written as you are not sure whether the female is married or not) , or Respected Sir or Respected Madam, or if you do not know the name you can write Director; or, CEO; etc. – To start with, firstly explain the reason behind writing this letter (in one sentence) and then directly write the letter in detail. For eg: Suppose you are writing a general letter or want to enquire about something you start with ‘…I am writing this letter to know about the ……. To convey sympathy to some official person you start with…’ I deeply regret on the sad demise….’ If you want to complain about something start with….’I am greatly disappointed for the fact that…..’ and further continue your letter with formal explanation of the cause behind writing this letter. – While writing a Business letter the language and the theme should be general and to the point despite of the your relation with the person to whom this letter is subjected. Business Letter is not only a formal way of communicating message but also acts as an important document which can be preserved as a record for future reference, if needed. The business letter must be written with complete concentration and in a clear language so as to convey the message very clearly and straightly. In case of a missed sentence or even a word for that matter, may land you up in a mess and give you a hard blow instead of working out positively for you. For eg: A letter for application of a job, one has to mention his complete expectations from the company clearly, as his impression as well as future earnings will obviously depend on this letter. Never use words like ‘don’t’ or ‘couldn’t’ instead use ‘do not’, or ‘could not’ as the later words sound more formal than the former ones. Use present tense and don’t try to show off. Moreover while closing your letter always use honest and gratifying words like ‘Truly yours’ or ‘Sincerely yours’ or Faithfully yours’ or ‘Thanking you’ or other regular ones like ‘Best Regards’ or ‘Sincere Regards’ etc… Believe in yourself and put in your best efforts and write a Business Letter that Gets You Good Results! (If you can’t do it by yourself, internet is always there to help you). Always remember “Word are mightier than Sword”.
Categories: Business Ideas | Tags: Business, effective, Good, Letter, Results, Write | Comments Off
August 16, 2010 | Posted by admin
The best links you should try to build for your best home business are definitely one way links. One way links are back links which link from another website to yours without any need for you linking back from your site. A lot of people with great home business ideas are unsure of reciprocal link exchange. Has reciprocal linking lost its value in search engine optimization?
Forget Traditional Reciprocal Link Exchange
Best home business owners have now realized that Google and other search engines do not favor the once popular traditional link exchange where webmasters used to just exchange links freely, mostly non-relevant ones. In fact it is possible that Google may well penalize those webmasters who have excessive non-relevant links using this method. Internet marketers are now resorting to smarter home business ideas to obtain relevant links for their best home business.
How To Get Relevant Links To Your Best Home Business Site
Traditional Way To Get Reciprocal Links
Most internet marketers with home business ideas are still adopting the time consuming way of relevant link exchange even though they may have advanced SEO tools to help them search for link partners. Once a relevant link partner has been identified, the marketer starts to correspond with the potential link partner to obtain agreement on the link exchange. The whole process can be exhaustive, as most of us including me have encountered before. It may be weeks or even months before a link partnership is formed. Sometimes, even the best home business webmasters do not reply to such requests or they are simply not interested or found your link not suitable.
There are many other best home business owners who create a reciprocal link exchange page inviting all kinds of websites to link to them. This approach may have some initial success for some marketers to obtain some relevant links. However it requires the owner with home business ideas to exercise good control over whom he approves as link partners. It’s a very labor intensive process and most of times, the webmaster may well just approve all link partners including non-relevant ones too to expedite a tedious task.
A Smarter, Easier Way To Get Relevant Links
Relevant Link Exchange – Recently there have been a good number of new sites who offer fully automated relevant link exchange services. They provide best home business sites with link exchanges with hundreds of totally relevant websites, which in turn increase their optimization theme and allow them to rank higher for targeted keywords they rank for their home business ideas website.
1. Select Your Keywords used in best home business – Once you have registered with the relevant link exchange, which usually offers both free and upgraded services, you will be asked to provide about five of your keyword phrases which you currently rank for your website. These keywords should be found in your website and well optimized too example home business ideas.
2. Website Description – The next thing you are required to do is provide a service category example home business ideas and one or two descriptions of your website or best home business using these keyword phrases. This will increase your keyword search engine marketing efforts.
3. Install Service Codes Into Website – Finally you will be given some html codes to install into your best home business website.
Once you have completed your submission for your top home business ideas site, the relevant link exchange with link partners is fully automated and you may start to obtain many relevant links from your partners without doing any real work. Over time as the registered number of websites increases, your links to your best home business site increase too along with your page rank.
As a registered member of the relevant link exchange site you can easily check from the website’s control panel who your relevant partners are, their page rank and if they fall into the keyword phrases category you have selected. A good relevant link exchange site should provide you with the capability to cancel any links with your partners for whatever reasons you may have, for example low page rank. You therefore still maintain full control of which website links to your best home business site and that is important.
Most of these relevant link exchanges will accord these back links to your best home business site only on a weekly basis to ensure natural link building growth and to avoid Google and other search engines deeming it as spam.. Depending on the link exchange you join, some of them provide your home business ideas site a link page listing out your partners in such a way that it appears as another natural page of your website.
It’s a simple concept that can boost your home business ideas, which may eventually get you many relevant links from similar niche partners who have similar keyword phrases. As it is fully automated, there is no real effort required and quite different from other link building activities. I think most best home business owners would welcome such services and agree it is a smarter way to get relevant links in order to rank higher in the search engines.
Categories: Business Checklist | Tags: Best, Business, Good, Home, Links, Reciprocal, Still | Comments Off
August 15, 2010 | Posted by admin
10 Rules for Good Business Writing
There are a number of real and imagined barriers to good business writing, but in all honesty it’s not rocket science. For sure, you might not get it right first time. But practice and constructive feedback make better if not perfect in time.
Here are some general rules which can be used for letters, business reports, web site copy or even presentations and speeches. You’ll need to pick and mix depending on what your needs your target audience.
In summary the steps are:
Start right now!
Be personal, conversational and friendly
Understand your audience
Focus on the key idea
Be clear about the outcome you want
Stress benefits not features
Think KISS!
Make it easy on the eye
Get the ‘technicals’ right
Share it with your inner circle
1. Start right now!
It’s human nature to put off what you don’t feel confident about doing. Many feel this way about business writing. The good thing about modern technology is that you can ‘plug and play’. Just get stuff down and you can refine it or edit it later if there’s no real urgency.
Unless you’re doing a print run of thousands, it doesn’t matter if you need to change it later as other ideas come to mind. 80% ‘right’ – whatever that is – will probably do?
2. Be personal, conversational and friendly
By and large write the way you think and talk personally so that you come across as authentic. There’s no need to adopt a ‘high and mighty’ formal style.
Using ‘I’ and ‘we’ helps you engage with your reader more effectively.
There’s no harm in having a particular point of view or opinion or being provocative as long as it’s not offensive. Humour can de difficult and is probably not right anyway for formal business communications.
Remember people don’t do business with businesses; they do business with people. Be friendly – will your letter or whatever pass the breakfast reading test?
3. Understand your audience
It often helps if you have a mental picture of the sort of person you’re writing to:
What paper do they read?
What business language would they be using if you were talking to them now?
How would they describe a particularly pressing business problem?
4. Focus on the key idea
What’s the single most important idea that you’re trying to get across? Does it really stand out? Think about what you want to say in terms of primary & secondary importance.
One of the challenges is that you probably know too much about what you want to say!
But less is more – and don’t expect people to read everything that you write.
What do you want the lasting impression to be when your target audience has finished reading your document?
5. Be clear about the outcome you want
Everything you write in business, from sales letters to budget plans, is trying to get a response. You want someone to do something. To be successful in business and in writing, you must persuade.
Start with your outcome in mind – define what you want to happen and work back from that.
A simple set of communications steps for a sales letter to prospective customers is:
Awareness: Have they heard of you and do they know what you do?
Interest: Do they have an interest in what you are offering and do they consider you to be a credible supplier?
Desire: have you generated sufficient interest and excitement to get the reader to go to the next step?
Action: Describe clearly what their next step is – the ‘Call to Action’. Make sure your contact details, for example, are highlighted.
For a Business Plan or Proposal this is most effectively done in the Executive Summary. This previews the main points of an in-depth report. It is usually written with non-technical people and those who are not inclined to read the main report in mind. It should reflect the main body of the document and you need to take care to make sure they are synchronised,
6. Stress benefits not features
Persuasive writing stresses benefits instead of features. Your reader doesn’t care how many bells and whistles your product has. The reader wants to know what your product is going to do for him or her.
Usually this means focusing on the emotional not just the rational benefits. Consider the perfume industry. Fashion houses do not sell stuff that makes you smell nice (the feature). They sell romance — how much more alluring and attractive she/he might be as a result of using the product (the benefit).
Feature Open 24 hours Benefit You can shop when you want
Batteries included Can be used out of the box
Power steering Less physical effort required
7. Think Kiss!
George Bernard Shaw once apologised for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to make it shorter. Simplifying, synthesising and editing do take time and effort. But your challenge is to make what you are writing about as easily understood as possible for the reader.
There are some techniques you can use here:
Uses short words – multi-syllable words are more difficult to read and absorb;
Vary the length of sentences but aim for no more than fifteen words;
Avoid capitals – believe it or not they are harder to read!
Start a new paragraph as often as it is logically possible;
Make sure your paragraph is not just one sentence;
Avoid jargon – always explain a TLA (three letter acronym) before you use it;
If it’s a particularly technical paper, consider a glossary of terms;
If there’s some necessary but extensive information or data such as research findings, then consider putting them in a series of appendices.
Use the active tense, for example:
Active: The Board will review all budget submissions in early November.
Passive: In early November, all budget submissions will be reviewed by the Board.
The Fog Factor
Longer words and longer sentences increase the difficulty of reading – the so called ‘fog factor’.
Microsoft Word has a tool for checking the readability of your material.
For example this guide has a Reading Ease of 64.6% where a rating of between 60-70% means it is easily understandable to 13-15 year old US students.
KISS doesn’t necessarily mean short – it just means being sufficiently informative and complete given the communications task that needs to be achieved.
8. Make it easy on the eye
Unless it’s a legal document it doesn’t have to look like one!
Spend some time formatting your content. When you read a newspaper, for example, (apart from starting at the Sports Page!) you probably scan the page looking for items of interest before you start reading a particular article word for word.
To help your reader, consider using:
Different fonts and sizes:These help highlight passages of text but should be used both sparingly and consistently;
Colour: This helps lift text off the page also and can be especially effective if it reflects your brand/house colours;
Pictures and diagrams; People absorb information in different ways. Some are more responsive to visual stimuli such as pictures, cartoons, models and diagrams (see below);
Bullets and lists:Bullets are symbols (numbers, boxes, circles, asterisks, dashes) that draw attention to a particular piece of text. These are excellent, for example, for lists and outlining the steps in a process;
Tables:these are an economical way too of presenting information and discipline you to keep it simple;
Subheads:Use mini-headlines to break up the copy in memos and letters and direct the reader through your writing.
As an example, here’s a homemade diagram that illustrates the touch points that impact a patient’s ‘entry to exit’ experience of a hospital stay.
9. Get the technicals right
Proof Reading
Spell check doesn’t help you if you use the wrong word but spell it correctly i.e. there/their, complement/compliment, practice/practise, stationary/stationery – so you need to eyeball (proof read) what you have written.
This is actually quite demanding and it’s too easy to see what you thought you’d written rather than what is actually written. If somebody on your team has eye for this kind of detail then use them!
It won’t help you either if in the excitement of mastering ‘cut and paste’ you end up duplicating something.
Version…
Categories: Business Ideas | Tags: Business, Good, Rules, Writiing | Comments Off
August 15, 2010 | Posted by admin
The best links you should try to build for your best home business are definitely one way links. One way links are back links which link from another website to yours without any need for you linking back from your site. A lot of people with great home business ideas are unsure of reciprocal link exchange. Has reciprocal linking lost its value in search engine optimization?
Forget Traditional Reciprocal Link Exchange
Best home business owners have now realized that Google and other search engines do not favor the once popular traditional link exchange where webmasters used to just exchange links freely, mostly non-relevant ones. In fact it is possible that Google may well penalize those webmasters who have excessive non-relevant links using this method. Internet marketers are now resorting to smarter home business ideas to obtain relevant links for their best home business.
How To Get Relevant Links To Your Best Home Business Site
Traditional Way To Get Reciprocal Links
Most internet marketers with home business ideas are still adopting the time consuming way of relevant link exchange even though they may have advanced SEO tools to help them search for link partners. Once a relevant link partner has been identified, the marketer starts to correspond with the potential link partner to obtain agreement on the link exchange. The whole process can be exhaustive, as most of us including me have encountered before. It may be weeks or even months before a link partnership is formed. Sometimes, even the best home business webmasters do not reply to such requests or they are simply not interested or found your link not suitable.
There are many other best home business owners who create a reciprocal link exchange page inviting all kinds of websites to link to them. This approach may have some initial success for some marketers to obtain some relevant links. However it requires the owner with home business ideas to exercise good control over whom he approves as link partners. It’s a very labor intensive process and most of times, the webmaster may well just approve all link partners including non-relevant ones too to expedite a tedious task.
A Smarter, Easier Way To Get Relevant Links
Relevant Link Exchange – Recently there have been a good number of new sites who offer fully automated relevant link exchange services. They provide best home business sites with link exchanges with hundreds of totally relevant websites, which in turn increase their optimization theme and allow them to rank higher for targeted keywords they rank for their home business ideas website.
1. Select Your Keywords used in best home business – Once you have registered with the relevant link exchange, which usually offers both free and upgraded services, you will be asked to provide about five of your keyword phrases which you currently rank for your website. These keywords should be found in your website and well optimized too example home business ideas.
2. Website Description – The next thing you are required to do is provide a service category example home business ideas and one or two descriptions of your website or best home business using these keyword phrases. This will increase your keyword search engine marketing efforts.
3. Install Service Codes Into Website – Finally you will be given some html codes to install into your best home business website.
Once you have completed your submission for your top home business ideas site, the relevant link exchange with link partners is fully automated and you may start to obtain many relevant links from your partners without doing any real work. Over time as the registered number of websites increases, your links to your best home business site increase too along with your page rank.
As a registered member of the relevant link exchange site you can easily check from the website’s control panel who your relevant partners are, their page rank and if they fall into the keyword phrases category you have selected. A good relevant link exchange site should provide you with the capability to cancel any links with your partners for whatever reasons you may have, for example low page rank. You therefore still maintain full control of which website links to your best home business site and that is important.
Most of these relevant link exchanges will accord these back links to your best home business site only on a weekly basis to ensure natural link building growth and to avoid Google and other search engines deeming it as spam.. Depending on the link exchange you join, some of them provide your home business ideas site a link page listing out your partners in such a way that it appears as another natural page of your website.
It’s a simple concept that can boost your home business ideas, which may eventually get you many relevant links from similar niche partners who have similar keyword phrases. As it is fully automated, there is no real effort required and quite different from other link building activities. I think most best home business owners would welcome such services and agree it is a smarter way to get relevant links in order to rank higher in the search engines.
Categories: Business Checklist | Tags: Best, Business, Good, Home, Links, Reciprocal, Still | Comments Off