State Of The (Health Care) Union
Health care insurance costs are a major headache for America’s self-employed. Like their larger brethren, small firms are coping with a general wave of medical inflation due to an aging population, advances in technology, and soaring prescription drug costs. In addition, small business entrepreneurs have problems that are unique to their own. “They have to pay more for the same coverage,” says Larry Levitt, an analyst with the Kaiser Family Foundation (www.kff.org), a national health care charity quoting from a recent study done by the National Association for the Self-Employed (www.nase.org) which concluded:
More than 65% of small-business owners say that cost is the single most significant barrier to offering health insurance to employees.
There’s significant increases in the percentage small businesses spent on health insurance premiums since 2005, with median costs rising from 3.7% of total revenue to 5.5%.
Overall, health insurance costs have increased an average of 14.7%, compared to a 20.7% increase in 2005.
Two issues respondents feel have the greatest impact on high healthcare costs are “insurance companies making too much profit” (28.8%) and “doctors/hospitals charging too much for services” (21.7%).
The Bad News For The Self-Employed
When a person gives the the grind of working for someone else to become self-employed, they give up having other people making decisions for them such as what kind of health care coverage are going to have. However, now that they’re the boss they discover that there are other pressing matters -such as building their business- to deal with which can make it difficult for them to find that time to research purchasing cost-effective health insurance.
Small Businesses: Health Insurance Whipping Boy – The premiums which small businesses -less than 200 employees- have for heath insurance coverage is increasing at twice the rate that it’s increasing for large (i.e. 500+) employees according to William M. Mercer Inc. (www.wmmercer.com), a consulting firm specializing in employee benefits. Not surprisingly, an estimated 40% of small business owners do without insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute (www.iii.com), because they believe they can’t afford it.
Poor Health Care Coverage Choices All Around
When it comes to purchasing health care coverage, the self-employed are left with several unappealing choices, not the least of which is not to offer any health benefits at all. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (www.ebri.org), a Washington, DC think tank, 60% of America’s 44 million uninsured people work for small businesses. Another unappealing choice for the unemployed is to pay the extra money for health benefits and just a pass on the extra costs to employees while another option is to pay the full cost of a worker’s heath insurance premium but make the employee pay the additional cost for family coverage. The difference, which can easily run $300 a month, imposes a major burden on a work force. Still another unpleasant option is for the small business to simply absorb the higher costs. They may not want to but are afraid that cutting back on benefits will cause their best employees to look for greener pastures. “In terms of getting a quality staff –folks who will stay– it is a necessity that we offer health insurance,” says Jim Amaral of Borealis Breads (www.borealisbreads.com), a bakery in Maine. continue reading »
Businesses spend a tremendous amount of time, resources, and capital on website development and online marketing initiatives. Getting people to a site is a challenge in itself, but another key aspect is retaining those visitors and converting them into buyers or subscribers.
Google search has set a high bar for relevance, speed, and ease of use. Unfortunately most site searches don’t meet these high expectations: 85 percent don’t return what the user sought, and 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor (Jupiter Research).
Search is the starting point to the world’s information. The major search engines have provided a great user experience and consumers have become accustomed to achieving high quality search results.
Why should this be different when a visitor comes to your site? You should be delivering that same experience users are accustomed to with Google and the other engines on your own website.
A good site search or internal search is imperative for a positive user experience. Whether your website is information or commerce-rich, people need to find what they are looking for. Two key points to providing a great user experience:
* Search is one of the most vital features of any content-rich or product-rich web site
* Support is the second most vital aspect – people need to be assisted on their way
Site search tips
Capture data points of searches which get zero search results: use that data to create content which will fill the void. Give people exactly what they are looking for.
How easy is it to find the site-search? Must be simple – don’t hide the search box. Instead of having a button that says search, where you have to click through to another page to actually conduct a search, have a search box above the fold in plain sight.
Are all your pages getting indexed in search? Make sure this is happening not just in Google, but in internal site searches.
Are synonyms triggering related pages? IE – if you have a site selling computers, is your search engine looking at pages about laptops too if someone does a query for the term netbook?
Date biasing – influencing search rankings by the age of content. Administrators should specify the influence of age in site search from low, medium, high to maximum, depending on strategy.
Top results biasing – ability to control biasing of Top N search results. This is important to highlight items you are interested in putting in the spotlight.
Give higher importance to specific section of web site – for example first 3 results can be from product or catalog pages, to help increase conversions.
Good content and products are vital – without that, it doesn’t matter if people are searching.
Study the use of your site search. Site search metrics can provide deep insights into what your customers want.
1) Find the right place- Most website visitors read content that is in the middle of a webpage. As a result, the best place to put your Adsense block is in the top part of the page, at the beginning of your web content. You want to weave the Google Ads into your web content to give the appearance that they are extra links which expand on the information of the page.
2) Use the Large Rectangle- With Google Adsense, you have the option of picking different ad formats. Most of the time people opt to use the Leaderboard (728×90) or Wide Skyscraper (160×600) style ads. Unfortunately, this is the wrong choice, because both look like blatant advertisements. Instead smart webmasters have found that using the Large Rectangle (336×280) yields the best amount of click-thrus.
3) Ditch the border- Many people experience a sharp increase in Adsense revenue when they changing their border. What they change is very simple…they get rid of the border on their Adsense blocks. This is another way to make the advertisements look like useful web content.
4) Adapt the font- Whenever you write content, it should be the same font size and style as your Google Adsense block. This will help make it appear that the advertisements are a natural part of your website.
5) Match the colors- In addition to changing the fonts, you also should match the colors of your website. For instance, if your content is written in black, and your hyperlinks are blue, then the Adsense blocks should also be the same color. Again, this helps the advertisements appear to be normal web content.
6) Don’t have too many distractions- On a webpage, it is important to give web visitor a limited number of options. By having too many links and graphics, the web visitor might go to a section that doesn’t help increase your profits. While it is important to inform and entertain your web visitor, it is also vital that you monetize your site. So if the main focus of your site is to earn an income through Google Adsense, then get rid of all non-essential links and graphics.
Let’s say you are a Muslim and you are totally not satisfied with the search filters provided by Google and other search engines. Here comes a search engine named ImHalal that will give you the ease to search the Internet without coming across any content that might be considered as ‘Haram’ according to the Islamic Law.
For a test, we entered some queries such as Alcohol, Nudity etc and were impressed to see that ImHalal does exactly what it’s supposed to, it blocks the query and warns the user since the results for the query may contain Haram content.
Thats not all! ImHalal even gives you a rating for the searched query if its explicit or contains any sort of Haram content. Moreover, it is able to fetch not only links, but also images and news for any particular query. The search engine uses various techniques to determine which results fetched are supposed to be ‘Halal’ or ‘Haram’.
Now it may not be the best search engine out there but it still comes with a noble purpose. Especially, it can be of great use in Muslim households where the parents are concerned about the types of sites their children visit on the Internet.
1) Find the right place- 