I think the best way to cost effectively advertise your service is as follows:

1. Make your own WordPress website that explains what you do, your unique selling propositions, the benefits of working with you, quotes from your previous customers, a call to action (e.g. get a free quote), and a contact form. You should also try to offer something of value (e.g. an ebook) in exchange for their name and email address.

I think you should give as many paid holidays as possible. If you did 10 last year (and everything worked out fine), then I would offer 15 this year with 5 of them floating. You may find that the extra paid holidays actually increase employee productivity due to higher morale and satisfaction. I would then keep increasing the paid holidays every year until you see a drop in productivity or team coordination issues.

Regarding the team not being all together sometimes: this is a problem all teams face and they need to learn how to redistribute work load in these circumstances. I have always found that work can very easily be redistributed and our fear of not having the team fully intact is usually over blown. Once you get this down, it’s nice to know that people can leave and the team productivity doesn’t screech to a halt.

Payment of holidays is part of the compensation program. Small businesses generally have less resources. The main factor is do your competitors offer holiday pay? Are you trying to attract certain employees who expect holiday pay? What type of employee atmosphere are you looking to create-your company culture?
More specifically to your more detailed analysis- be careful. By making a holiday an option-that can be taken another time you are creating a “floating vacation day” Vacation day rules-while voluntary -create a right to the worker to receive payment and will as you analyzed mean their will be multiple days during the year when your entire team will not be present. With the holiday you know everyone will be off that day but will have one less day per year that people will take off if you make it a floating holiday. The vacation day will create another vacation day and right to payment. Ultimately the decision is yours-D Bay

About Ask Brien

It appears your audience is nationwide? Cost effective can mean limited budget or return on investment. As to both I would look to social media. You can try YouTube or Facebook for advertising. Facebook ads can begin at $5 per day. YouTube can be effective if you gear your ads to your target market. As to effectiveness there is no magical formula. You need to test and test and test. When something works put your money into that test that was successful. Success can be earning $1 more then you paid for some people and others need more.

An S Corporation allows you to avoid double taxation. A regular C corporation is taxed on earnings and when distributions are made to shareholders they must pay taxes on those dividends. In an S corporation you receive a K-1 Statement based upon your ownership in the corporation . All of the income and expenses flow through to the shareholders in an S Corporation. Every corporation is a C corporation. To qualify for an S corporation you must be a resident alien of the U.S.A, all shareholders must consen, you must have less than 75 shareholders and you must file the S election timely with the IRS

A 1099 is issued to an independent contractor vendor and others. Some employers in an attempt to avoid paying payroll taxes may classify someone as an independent contractor. If you qualify as a 1099 the government generally considers you to be a separate business. The County of Orange and Cities within Orange generally will require a business license. To assist you I created a chart:

There are a few first steps that should be taken as follows:

1. Check for proper meta title, description, and keyword information on ALL your website pages. Look at other competing websites at the top of Google results to see how their meta titles and descriptions are structured.

2. Run your website through the MozBar and Meta SEO Inspector Google Chrome plugins and fix all issues/errors shown. This includes all meta information, H1 and H2 tags, and image alt tags.

3. Create a sitemap.xml, upload it to the root folder of your website, and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to crawl your index page as Google and then submit it to their index with the crawl all sub links option. This will ensure Google quickly reindexes your website and all of its internal links.

5. Use the Goolge Chrome inspector to make sure their are no console errors using the “Console” tab and that the website is loading quickly (with no extra large assets/images) in the “Network” tab.

The above is what should be done at a minimum.

Your corporate veil will be protected as long as you have a yearly meeting. Failure to file corporate formalities that include more then meetings could make a shareholder personally liable. Monthly meetings, though are not required. Material changes and yearly meetings are a minimum requirement as long as other corporate formalities are complied.

About Ask Brien

The best way to get traffic is through SEO! Why? Because it’s free and highly targeted. Here’s a pretty decent checklist:

1. Have proper meta title, description, and keyword information on ALL your website pages. Look at other competing websites at the top of Google results to see how it’s done correctly.

2. Have a lot of content pages that match the keywords in your meta information. Content pages are things that go into depth about your business, website, or offering. This is why those new and cool single page websites aren’t that great for SEO.

3. Have a blog that you update regularly (e.g. at least once per week). Google loves educational content and it supports your website’s ranking under targeted keywords. Also, people coming to your website to get educated will regularly convert into customers.

4. Try and get some back links from other blog articles, blog comments, news publications, forums, other websites, resource directories, Yelp, etc. A back link is just a link from another website to your own. It’s best to have what’s called an anchor title associated with it (e.g. “best web developer” as a link). Google’s entire ranking algorithm is based on back links. The bigger the website that give you a back link, the more it counts toward your Google ranking (i.e. go get one on CNN!).

5. Get and stay active on all your social media accounts.

6. Get great reviews on Yelp, Clutch, Google Business reviews, and any other review websites.

There’s a ton of other stuff too. The above will get your well on your way though!