Daily Biz Solutions

By Jim Gates, CAFS

The indoor air quality of an office environment is very important to the health, comfort, well being, and productivity of every person who works there. Improved indoor air quality is also important to management, as a healthy working environment can lead to higher productivity and fewer lost work days.

Improving Air Quality at Work

Many different factors have an influence how indoor air pollutants affect the occupants of an office environment. Exposure to high levels of pollutants over long periods of time increases the risk of serious, life threatening illnesses and short term exposures can result in irritation and significant respiratory problems. There are many different ways that indoor air quality can be improved:

1. Ensure Proper Air Circulation

Make sure that all air vents and grills are free of obstruction. This allows the indoor air to circulate freely and ventilate wide areas of the office environment. Furniture, boxes, or other materials placed near supply vents or return air grilles can significantly affect air flow.

2. Proper Waste Disposal

Dispose of all waste and garbage promptly and in the proper manner. Leaving waste around the office environment can result in unpleasant odors, the growth of mold and bacteria, and the attraction of pests that can contaminate the air with their waste.

3. Observe Smoking Policy

Make sure that all employees fully comply with the building’s smoking policy. Tobacco smoke exposure can result in respiratory illnesses, breathing difficulties, and lung cancer and tobacco smoke in a building can increase costs for maintaining the ventilation system and for cleaning and replacing smoke-filled furnishings.

4. Isolate Ventilation Hazards

Actions and items that could release unhealthy contaminants or odors in the building should be confined to well-ventilated areas. Many products commonly used in offices, like solvents, adhesives, and pesticides, release chemical pollutants and odors. Office equipment, such as copiers, printers, and fax machines, can have harmful emissions as well. People react differently when exposed to the same contaminants at similar concentrations and exposure to low levels of contaminants emitted by these items may be irritating to people with asthma and other pre-existing conditions.

5. Use High Quality Air Conditioner Filters

High quality air filters will remove many contaminants and air pollutants from the indoor air when they are properly installed and maintained. Filters should be changed on a regular schedule to prevent the build-up of dust and other contaminants from being released back into the air flow. There are many different types of high quality air filters available, making it easy for owners to find the best types of air filters for their equipment.

Breathe Easy at Work

Good indoor air quality management practices can make a big difference in the quality of the indoor air in an office environment. Most indoor environmental problems can be prevented or corrected easily with the application of common sense and vigilance while other air quality issues can be resolved with the addition of high quality air filters to the building’s equipment. Good indoor air quality is dependent on the actions of everyone in the building, so a good working partnership between management and employees is the best way to maintain a healthy and productive office environment.

About the Author

Jim Gates, CAFS, is the brand manager for Quality Filters, Inc. (http://qualityfilters.com), a leading manufacturer and distributor of high quality home and commercial air filters. The company’s products are available online at BuyFilters.com (http://buyfilters.com).

When you own a small business, it’s just as important to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and your family members as it is to focus on taking care of operating your business and making sure that the needs of your customers or clients are met. Too often, small business owners focus all of their efforts and resources on their companies to their own detriment. However, it’s important to remind yourself that you have to be okay yourself in order for your business to be okay.

One of the things that you really need to do is to make sure that you have proper health insurance coverage in place for yourself and your family to make sure that you will have the means to pay for any medical care that you or your loved ones might need. Doing so may involve seeking out an individual or small group private insurance policy or making sure that you are signed up for the best options available through Medicare plans if you are eligible to do so.

With so many options available, making a decision about health insurance can seem overwhelming. However, it’s nowhere near as overwhelming as the challenges that you’ll face if you find yourself facing a health problem without having health coverage in place. Such a situation would impact you, your family and the small business you have worked so hard to build.

Are you looking for a way to improve your company’s image and brand? Logo merchandise can provide a powerful way of increasing name recognition and awareness. Consider using logo merchandise to help identify your employees, as well as to provide appreciation gifts to your current customers and as a strategy for attracting prospective customers.

Three Logo Item Ideas

There are many different types of logo items that can help boost your brand; choosing the right kind for your business is a function of the type of company you have, what your work environment is like and who your clients are.

• Embroidered Shirts: If your customers come into your place of business and your company is one where a business casual dress code is appropriate, consider having your employees wear embroidered shirts to work.
• Baseball Caps: Providing your employees and your best customers with baseball caps is a great way to help spread your company’s name and raise brand awareness throughout the community. Be sure to choose high quality caps so that the one with your logo is the one that people will pick up when heading out to attend or participate in outdoor activities. If your employees visit client locations or otherwise provide outdoor service, they can wear their caps with the embroidered shirts you provide.
• Reusable Grocery Bags: With so many people opting to take their own tote bags to the supermarket rather than using paper or plastic bags provided by the stores they visit, you may want to consider ordering imprinted reusable grocery bags. What a great way to help get your name out.

Guest Post by William Eve

Whether you’re a professional business coach or a life insurance agent or a remote travel agent, chances are, you have a website and would like to be directing new customers to this site. After all, with millions of new webpages coming online every day, it can be a challenge to make yours stand out from the rest. And staying in business can be difficult if you are not constantly scouting for new customers. The cheapest and most effective way to find new potential buyers is on the internet, of course. But what ways have been proven to work in driving quality traffic to websites of small business owners?

The following seven ideas will give you a general scope of what’s working today, as well as offer some tips for those looking to delve deeper into these fields of marketing and advertising.

Social Media Marketing

One of the most popular mechanisms of the new millennium for driving traffic to your site organically would be social media marketing. This includes: Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Google+ and more. This is word of mouth marketing, and with a good enough product or service, this can be the best marketing technique you’ll ever use. They key to success here is to build up a loyal fan base, which will like your business page on Facebook and retweet your Twitter messages regarding the latest news or deals for your company. To build your list, you ought to have strong incentives for people to follow you, such as periodic deals offered only to those on your list or fans of your business’s page. Social media marketing is dependent upon people taking what you offer them and sharing it with some friends, who will share it with some of their friends?and the chain continues with minimal effort on your part.

For example, if you work in life insurance sales, you may want to offer them valuable advice through a Facebook page for no cost to them. Or if you sell scarves, you could offer a free or discounted scarf for the first ten who retweet your Twitter messages. The possibilities are limitless when it comes to social media marketing.

Free Newsletters

Free newsletters are excellent ways of staying in touch with your customer base while providing them with something immensely valuable (and at no cost) in return for the permission to occasionally pitch things you’re selling to them. Many business owners opt for monthly newsletters via email, because this is cheap, efficient, and you have a good idea of how many people are interested in your business venture. You can include informative articles, humorous pieces, stories, and even small adverts within these priceless digital packages.

Free eBook

If constantly developing and formatting a new newsletter every month seems a bit daunting, then why not invest the time and effort (or money, if hiring a ghost writer) and create an ebook to give away to new customers that sign up for email updates? If it is full of useful information that people are simply dying to get their hands on, then this can be an excellent way to build your base without much extra effort after the initial creation process. Almost every industry could offer ebooks to its customers: insurance sites can offer basic guides to life insurance, horse-related businesses can offer equine health care manuals, clothing manufacturers can offer store comparisons, etc. If it is something customers would like to read, then ebooks are the way to go.

Contests

This has been growing in popularity over the years. Many businesses offer contests with big incentives for just minimal participation (usually just having customers sign up with their email addresses in order to enter). The investment in the grand prize- be it a private session with you if you have a service-based business or a gadget such as an iPod touch- will more than pay for itself with the audience you’ll garner as a result of hosting the contest. It works even better when you have multiple prizes or regular contests to keep people interested, rather than removing their email from your databases immediately upon completion of the contest.

Affiliate Marketing

If you sell informational products, then affiliate marketing is an absolute must. This allows people to make reasonable commissions off of the sale of your product, and while this may initially seem like it’s eating into your profit margins, it’s actually much better than you’d think. After all, you are essentially removing a chunk of the profits and drastically cutting your paid marketing efforts at the same time. Giving other people incentive to go out and actively market your products for you is one of the best marketing tools available today.

Article-Based Marketing

Search engine optimisation has become quite advanced over the past several years, and many people are still using this keyword based marketing tool to their advantage. The idea behind this is writing articles with specific keywords in them in order to make more search engines drive web surfers to your website. Terms such as “Australia holidays” or “life insurance comparison” or “investing in China” are some such examples of keywords that people type into a search engine, and sites with more of these keywords come up first. SEO-embedded articles have the best chance of organically driving more traffic to your site, making this a must for any business owner with their own website.

Blog

Last but not least, is the blog. Most companies have blogs, but very few use them effectively. A business that makes the best use of their company blog will be adding SEO keywords in each post, offering regular updates (3-6 posts per week), and offering relevant information that is not to sales-y. People like to stay in touch with companies they regularly or are considering buying from and blogging- even if they’re just 300 word posts- is the best way to simply stay in touch and keep people informed about the business.

So, when it comes to attracting new customers to your online business, the seven ways listed above are the most popular for a reason: they work. And, when you manage to execute these marketing concepts effectively, you’ll be far ahead of the competition and cementing your business as a formidable opponent in the online marketplace.

Are you in the process of securing funding to enable your small business to grow? Making sure that your business is properly capitalized is a key to ensuring that your company is poised for success as you prepare to move to the future. It can be difficult to know how to best approach getting the funds that you need to accomplish your objectives for your company. Do you take out a loan? Do you consider equity financing? Should you purchase or lease the equipment that you need to move forward? These are important structured finance questions that can certainly be overwhelming for business owners to consider.

Unless you have expertise in business finance, it just might be in your best interest to seek assistance from a third party organization that provides services and expert advice related to structured finance for companies like yours. Doing so might help you make better decisions about how to make sure that your company has access to the best structured finance options to secure the funds you need now and into the future, without taking on unnecessary debt or finding yourself subject to paying high interest rates that you might be able to avoid.