Singapore’s highly-skilled workforce, favorable tax regime, extensive FTA network, strategic geographic location and test-bedding opportunities are some of the factors that such potential start-ups wish to leverage upon. Incorporating a company in Singapore is not a complicated process if one has the papers right and skills to meticulously organize and follow up on any developments or queries. Nevertheless engaging an expert is always a prudent approach because when operating on a foreign land familiarity with the system always helps.

Bizcorp Management Pte Ltd, is a leading Business registration and company formation practice in Singapore. Bizcorp provides an array of comprehensive incorporation and business administration services. Its client roster includes companies ranging from sole proprietorship to Multi-National Corporation.

Bizcorp’s comprehensive company incorporation package starts from S$600 and includes company name search, the registration process itself, right up to the preparation of company seal. The service bandwidth expands even beyond incorporation, Bizcorp helps companies with its service to manage ongoing regulatory compliance matters as well as provides accounts management services. Innumerous local entrepreneurs and many foreign companies and entrepreneurs have engaged Bizcorp for their company incorporation requirements and have continued to retain Bizcorp to manage their accounts and compliance matters.

By engaging  professional consultancy like Bizcorp, foreign enterprises and entrepreneurs can complete their incorporation process remotely unless some special circumstances requires their presence in Singapore. This enables saving of resources. Apart from saving time and money, the promoters can focus on their core operational tasks which will facilitate an immediate kick start of the business when the company is incorporated. This is a very significant benefit because in the present scenario the ‘time to market’ is an important phenomenon to succeed.

Elaborating on the advantages of engaging an incorporation expert Mr. Jason Chen Director of Bizcorp Management Pte Ltd says, “As we have been managing the incorporation of companies and registrations of businesses of all nature and size from various parts of the world, we have achieved a sort of domain expertise and this makes the whole process seem so much easier. It saves time and money for the client and even before a client incorporates, we can advise whether the move will benefit the client or even which types of entity to choose depending on the nature of business. This way the client is relieved of the procedural nitty-gritty and will be in a position to better streamline their business plan”.

For a quick overview of the incorporation procedure and requirements for both local Singaporeans and foreigners, visit Company Registration Singapore.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post.

But first, what exactly is a press release? A press release is simply a written communication to the news media to publicize something that can be claimed as news-worthy. The principle goal is usually to garner good news reviews that may provide positive publicity meant for products described inside the news release.

Media releases were initially intended as a communication tool between an organization’s PR staff or PR companies and the media. Nowadays, you will find media release submission companies on the internet that help disseminate your press release online. The more established players can even get your news release syndicated at widely-used news sites , including Google News.

To have a perception of just how popular online news search might be, comScore has reported that half of internet users visit an online news site every month. Hence, it is not suprising that online marketing experts highly recommend using media releases to drive targeted visitors to websites. This method is becoming increasingly popular with increased awareness, and a query on Yahoo discloses a variety of creative companies offering optimized media release assistance for individuals and businesses seeking to get publicity for their products and services.

Having said that, media releases are not only great for marketing but also presents a good opportunity for obtaining inbound links, that happens to be important for Search Engine Optimization. SEO refers to the website optimization process, necessary for obtaining higher rankings in the search results.

To start, most of the news release submission sites possess high trust factors and so, any one-way link from these websites will be invaluable. PR sites like 24-7PressRelease.com are evidently aware about this and feature an SEO plan, that allows the use of anchortext links, due to this fact.

Furthermore, a good number of blogs and websites re-publish content material from news release and internet news sites, giving your news release even more publicity and letting you reach a wider audience on the internet. If anchortext links were embedded in the press release, there is a fair chance that these blogs and websites will also include them together with your news release, hence, producing many inbound links to your site in a single day.

To that end, listed below are some pointers to help you get the most out of news releases:

1. The trick towards producing a great and impressive news release is to systematically prepare and check your press release before submitting. Begin with something worth announcing and focus on a particular subject. Too much information and focusing on many keywords will probably weaken the message for both search engine spiders and readers.

2. Just about all good press releases abide by a certain structure. Search for news releases online and examine the top ones you discover. Compose a good heading and write a teaser inside the summary, to motivate the reader to read further. Attempt to write 450-500 words in the body of the media release and ensure that you include the relevant particulars, including contact information.

3. Include anchortext links within your press release to maximize the SEO value, if allowed by the news release provider. Certain providers charge a fee to enable this particular feature, while others may only permit using the website URL as a hyperlink or even add a “nofollow” attribute to the outgoing links. As a rule of thumb, try to maintain a proportion of 1 link for every 250 words to be able to avoid your press release from looking too spammy.

4. There are various wire services that provide press release distribution like PRweb, Prlog and 24-7 Press Release. List down the ones that are affordable to you and at the same time, provide features which can satisfy your marketing objectives. There are free , as well as, paid distribution services, PR release websites that Yahoo and Google favour for news syndication and even ones that include social features.

5. If you distribute the same press release through more than one wire service providers on a single day, it is very likely that Google News will exclude the duplicates. Therefore, if your press release has several angles, you need to make an attempt to re-write the content for the different newswire provider to make them appear unique.

6. After your news release has been reviewed and published, you could help publicize it through various means. This includes publishing the press release on your business website, writing about it in your blog , as well as, submitting it to social media websites like Twitter.

7. Last but not least, check your site’s analytics to gauge the impact of your news release marketing work.

For example, take a look at QuestNet, an MLM company with 3 million members worldwide. They have a successful newsletter at Qpportunity.com, dubbed Questnet Online Magazine, that is published every other week.

The newsletter is very well structured with the following sections - Personal Development, Network News, Product Highlights, Product Promo, QShoppe Corner and more. They also keep an Archive to allow their subscribers to read past issues.

It’s quite simple to start an email campaign, and even easier to use one of the many hosted services like CampaignMonitor. You can create your campaign online, customize it with your design and send out the newsletters for a flat-fee of $5/campaign + $0.01/receipient.

There’s also advanced testing tools, e.g. to see how your newsletter would look like in Outlook or Gmail, and integration with Google Analytics to track the campaign.

Easy isn’t it? Now, you only need to work on the content.

As your business grows bigger, you will have to contend with poor product reviews, false claims, competitor attacks, squatters and even hate sites - hate sites are the worse because they are more believable since they are created by genuine customers who have bought and dislike your products. Don’t believe me? Just check out www.ihatedell.net for an example.

In the early days of ORM, a company would just engage an SEO consultant to bury these “negative” websites in search engine results by means of optimizing existing company websites or by creating spam, e.g. Facebook page, Wordpress blog, etc.

This method worked well and especially for smaller companies. But as the search engines became smarter, it became more difficult and less effective to do this. On Yahoo, while you could dominate the top 10 results, the negative ones may appear in the form of “suggestions” below these search results.

Hence, a more effective (and sustainable) method going forward is to create a “PR” website where you highlight the positives, explain the problems (if any) and give an assurance that you’re working to resolve them.

One such example is a website called QuestNet Scam, which at first glance looks like a hate site. But upon visiting the website, you will learn that it’s a very clever PR effort. The company comes clean about it’s shortcomings right from the beginning, explaining that the problems they face is not unique to them but to all MLM companies as well.

They do this subtly using a Q&A with QuestNet’s MD and emphasizes the company’s strong points at the end - established since 1998, 3 million members, presence in 160 countries, blah, blah, blah.

There are 3rd party reviews/testimonials in the QuestNet Reviews area to show that the company has it’s fair share of satisfied customers, and thus cannot be a scam. They also explain about their problems in India and how they are working to address them.

Infact, the site doesn’t even convince readers that it is NOT a scam but instead give them QuestNet’s side of the story and them let them decide for themselves.

Isn’t this a smarter way to manage your online reputation?

Your website is the online version of your physical store. Not only that, it’s “open” 24 hours a day and customers can come in to learn about your product and make a purchase too - websites are so powerful! Now, would you walk into or buy from a store that looks dirty and smells bad, where the whole place looks suspicious and the products are hard to locate? I’m pretty sure the answer’s NO! The same goes for websites.

Features of a website that you should pay attention to:

1) Flash Animation
- unless you’re in the “creative” business, forget about fancy flash animations that take ages to load.

2) Web Design
- having a pleasant design is a given but you must also ensure that your website projects the correct image about your company. Menus should be visible and self-explanatory for easy navigation - consider adding “breadcrumbs” so your visitors know where they’re at. There should be proper meta titles and page titles on every webpage so your visitors (and search engines too) know what the page is about.

3) Webpage Content
- most people don’t actually read webpages but scan across the content. Hence, use a condensed version (short paragraphs are good too) and give them options to learn more, e.g. Click Here For Details, Download Product PDF, View Powerpoint Presentation and Watch A Video.

4) Web Hosting
- web hosting is cheap these days so there’s no reason not to get a proper hosting plan. The idea is to ensure your pages load fast enough for a smooth surfing experience for your site visitors. Infact, if there’s heavy internal use like lots of big email accounts or an Intranet, you should just go for dedicated hosting - check out Questnet Hosting for a sample of what’s included.

5) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- ok, there’s no point in having a fantastic website but no visitors. Sure, you can advertise but doesn’t that costs money?! SEO is optimizing your website for search engines like Google and Yahoo, in order to rank high in their search results for a set of targeted keywords - I know it’s a mouthful so read it over a couple of times until you understand. Of course, there’s no guarantee with SEO but for a slice of the 1,000,000,000 searches/month and a chance at free, targeted traffic, I think it’s difficult to ignore. Besides there are many SEO consultants our there, from those who charge peanuts to those who charge an-arm-and-leg - pick one that’s reliable and suits your budget.

Good luck!