Preparing Your Business

When you begin to plan an Internet site to develop your business, it is just as important to spend time in the planning stages as you would for a storefront operation. I mention this because I have met several people this summer who made this mistake. Just because it is cheaper to start an online business than a main street, location does not make it less of a business.

You build successful businesses on the solid ground of research and planned implementation. Few shortcuts will allow you to ignore these necessary steps. Following a hunch or a feeling will usually lead you into a failure that costs you the resources you started with.

Fortunately, we have an excellent resource in this area that I encourage all potential owners to utilize. The Oklahoma Small Business Development Center located on the Carl Albert State College campus is a good place to het help with all your business needs. The OSBDC can help you avoid making costly mistakes and connect you with the information you need to make informed decisions.

Researching your market is just as important as deciding which shipper you will use for your order fulfillment. If you who missed the Women in Agriculture & Small Business Conference & Trade Show at the Bob Lee Kidd Community Center in June, you missed a very good business resource. One of the presenters was Jason Harvey with the Oklahoma Agriculture Enhancement & Diversification Program. The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture runs this and it is designed to help add value to agricultural products and increase revenues for rural Oklahoma. This program stresses research and planning to create new jobs in our communities. There are grants and loans available for feasibility studies, marketing and product development. There is an emphasis on creating new and innovative ways to market products.

The Internet is one way to market your product that may have lower start-up or overhead costs. A strong advantage is the ability to track very specific information about your potential customers and use this information to create new marketing strategies. It is possible to find out how much potential demand there is from Internet customers before you create a website and exactly which search terms they would use to find what you have to sell. This information can allow you to have a strong action plan built on research, not hunches or feelings. Once the website is operational, strong analytics programs can help you define future strategies by providing insights into what more you can do to turn visitors into customers.

(Mike Myklin is an author, speaker and ecommerce owner who can help your business get more value from the Internet. You can reach him at http://www.myklin.com/ where these articles are archived.)

Oklahoma Sex Offenders

As old as I am, I guess I am still an innocent when it comes to some aspects of human behaviour. My experience with finding sex offenders started when someone at a playground mentioned that a registered sex offender lived next door to them. They had found out when a police visit to the resident lead to his neighbors being questioned about him. What made them nervous was that he had been there for five months.

Until the police made a housecall they had no idea that he was a potential problem. It turns out that he had repeated his offenses on another vulnerable person and was subsequently jailed again. So these people were lucky that a predator had been removed from their neighborhood.

After hearing their story I decided to look at my own neighborhood but was thinking that I wouldn't find anyone I wasn't aware of already. Boy, was I wrong! There were over a dozen that I had never seen in our local newspaper. The reason was simple.

These criminals had committed their crimes in other areas and then moved to my neighborhood after their convictions. The ones that I found were the ones that had followed the law and registered with the local police. The state of Oklahoma says that over 14% of the people convicted do not register and some states (like Nevada) report much higher lost criminals.

Even a state with a low population density (like Oklahoma) has over 6000 registered sex offenders and a list of over 850 missing sex offenders.

This is why we started the notification service for people who want to know when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood. No one bothers to keep up with the sex offenders who move around. The police may know but they are not going to tell you unless they want to know something.

This situation was brought to mind this week for me because in my local newspaper there were two different people found guilty of not registering as sex offenders with the local police. I live in Leflore County, Oklahoma. It's a small county with a low population and we had two criminals hiding here. I wonder what it would be like for an area like Tulsa that has over a thousand registered sex offenders.

If you are interested in keeping your loved ones safe you can find out from us who is moving into your neighborhood. Our service is free and it will take you just a few minutes to get the information. Here's the website: http://www.Be-warned.net