Writing technique for RFP (Request for Proposal)

A while back, a potential client provided me with some general details of the writing work he wanted me to do for his firm. Then he asked me to send him a proposal.

Proposal?! I panicked as I tried to confirm with him what he meant by that since I had never done one before, at least not as a freelancer.


I must've not really wanted to pursue this opportunity since I didn't bother to do research or follow up with the company after submitting a contract instead of a proposal. A little time passed, I came across an article on writing RFPs (Request for Proposal). Ding! The light bulb went on. This guy verbally gave me his RFP and wanted a written response.

When a firm requires a project to be completed by a contractor or outside source, they write a RFP. This is a formal document describing the project, how the contract companies should respond, how the proposals will be reviewed, and contact information. Often, the company documents the submission guidelines to make it easier for them to compare responses. There are no specific standards or guidelines for creating the RFP, but government agencies usually strict standards they follow when conducting the proposal process.
Outside companies read the RFP and write a proposal (a bid) explaining how they can best offers and meet those needs. When writing the proposal, the company should closely follow the guidelines established in the RFP to avoid being removed from consideration for the potential project.

A typical proposal contains:
• Executive summary - summary of the entire proposal
• Statement of need - why project is necessary
• Project description - How project will be implemented and evaluated
• Organization information
• Project schedule
• Budget
• Conclusion

My situation was an informal version of all this. The client gave me a high level overview of what I might do for him. If I knew then what I know now, I would've written up a description of the client's needs and how I would complete the work in meeting those needs.

Small businesses would likely do a proposal in between the one I got and the complex government required ones. Most small businesses will be prompted to write a proposal when approaching a client. The client may ask you to submit a proposal outlining what you can do for them. In this case, write a proposal including the elements of a typical proposal and keep it short and to the point especially if the client is not a large company.

There are examples of RFPs and responses peppered throughout the Web, but which one you can learn from depends on the type of work involved. A proposal can be two pages or as big as a book. Rely on your favorite search engine and do the research to create an unbeatable proposal.

Account Payables - What is it?

In basic terms, account payables refer to an account that contains money that a person or business owes another person or business. Although the task is complicated in businesses, the meaning can be understood by associating it with the individual. For the average person, account payables refer to any bills they receive during the month, such as the phone and electric bills. It literally is the paper bill they receive reminding them they owe money for a product or service they received. You can take the same notion and apply it to the business world. The reason it becomes more difficult is because there is a higher volume of invoices that have to be tracked for record keeping. Because this amount can get extremely high, many companies use software, along with their regular bookkeeping employees. In addition to using software, some companies outsource this task to a professional organization. These usually are used when it is not possible to hire an in-house employee to take on the task. Many counterfeit companies send advertisements that resemble bills to companies. In small print it will say that it isn't a bill, but many people miss this and send the company a check. Another reason account payables often is done with software and personnel is to avoid missing or duplicating invoices. This can cause a huge mistake in a company's budget. One of the most common ways this mistake happens is because of duplicate invoices. An invoice could get lost or misplaced so another is sent as a replacement. The replacement is paid, but in the meantime, the original is found by someone else and gets paid.

SEO Training Article Writing and Syndication

Imagine the number of links to a web site that are established when an article is submitted and accepted by 1,000 article directories. From that one article, 1,000 new links will be established. Outsourcing to a professional firm guarantees high quality articles and increases the speed of article syndication since you don't have to write the articles yourself. Article content creation and syndication is another powerful strategy you should consider when hiring an Arizona Search Engine Optimization Service. One important consideration in writing articles for syndication is that the articles should focus on a prime keyword or prime keyword phrase you wish to get search engine ranking for. Careful research and determination of the best keywords to focus an article on is important in terms of the achieved effectiveness of syndicating any article. A third benefit of article syndication is that those reading the article in an article directory may click on the link in the article resource box driving additional traffic to a website. When submitting to article directories, it is also possible that the article will be placed on other web sites increasing article syndication. One important consideration in writing articles for syndication is that the articles should focus on a prime keyword or prime keyword phrase you wish to get search engine ranking for. Careful research and determination of the best keywords to focus an article on is important in terms of the achieved effectiveness of syndicating any article.

Professional SEO: Hand Off to Bob or Outsource the Job

The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website. If you have added this responsibility to some poor souls job description with the direction that he or she should "do the best you can," youll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed. Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added. Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business.

Important Rules in Website Design

As people don't have time and hence don't prefer to wait to visit your website. Avoid them as much as possible. Avoid too much advertisement Since most of us have got the banner blindness and hence there is no use of adding too much of banners or image ads on your site as this might turn away your visitors. This should ensure that your website design is pleasing as well. Instead you can use those text ads or other affiliate links without being too obtrusive. Make it easy to navigate When it comes to web design you should make it easy to navigate from one page to another and all the pages should be accessible from your home page. You can avoid the flash based navigation menus or unwanted drop down buttons. If you find any bugs in your design unlike if you outsource it elsewhere and find it hard to make changes because of difficulty to contact them. Or hire some company which could be contacted easily. Avoid using the splash pages It is better to avoid those pesky splash pages or so called welcome pages on your website. This is the most common mistake that a web design company make. As people don't have time and hence don't prefer to wait to visit your website. Avoid them as much as possible.

Get Free Web Traffic from Hubpages and Traffic Generation Explosion

Hub pages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their content like many people do on eBay by selling goods. From Squidoo.com: We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That's direct out of pocket expenses like rent, salary and benefits expenses. So, other than the obvious revenue sharing, is there any other reason to consider using Hubpages? YES! As Hubpages is considered an authority by Google, you are able to make money with the Google Adsense that is on your hubpage. Outsource the writing, and by doing so, you free up your time to create more Hubpages. Another great aspect of any free content hosting site, is that they have already built-in traffic from other members. Developing content on Hubpages should become an important part of your overall promotional strategies. Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages. In addition to your actual 'hubs' ranking on the various search engines, you can link directly to your other websites! And guess what? These backlinks are counted.

Article Marketing Tips - The Shocking Truth About PLR Articles

You risk the chance that your articles will be denied by many of the bigger article directories (which are the ones that will actually bring you in traffic). This is why many people rewrite PLR articles when they purchase them. If you honestly sit back and take a look at it, if you plan to rewrite articles completely that you've purchased, why not just write a fresh one from scratch? I can honestly say that rewriting PLR articles can oftentimes require more work than if you would have created a fresh article yourself. They just aren't worth the time or money. If you don't know what they are, they are articles created by another person that you can purchase and put your name on the article, making it appear as if you were the actual writer of the article. Many people out there believe in PLR articles, because they claim that they save them time. Personally, I beg to differ. While the goal of being able to increase your time is to outsource work or purchase work from others, I think there are better ways to do it than purchasing PLR articles.