Georgia Incorporation FAQ: Out of State Corporation Filing

Some corporate entities that were created in states outside Georgia are required to register with the Georgia Secretary of State.

How do you know which “foreign” corporations are required to do this?

You’ll need to read the provisions of the OCGA covering corporate laws in Georgia. The statutes you may need are:

14-2-1501 for profit corporations

14-3-1501 for nonprofit corporations

Georgia law states that foreign corporations may not conduct business within the state of Georgia until it obtains a certificate of authority from Georgia’s Secretary of State.

What is “transacting business”?

Good question. There are a number of activities mentioned in the OCGA at the statutes mentioned that explain which activities are considered transacting business. Those businesses that are doing these activities will be required to register. If not – no registration is required.

Each foreign corporation must decide for itself whether it’s activities require filing or not. Lawyers are the obvious second choice if you don’t understand whether or not to file.

If you decide that your business is transacting business according to the statutes above and must register your corporation – you must do so within 30 days of starting to transact business business activities in Georgia.

Georgia Incorporation FAQ: When to File Annual Registration?

It might seem a little bit confusing about when to file your annual corporate regisration in Georgia. Here’s how it works.

On the day your Georgia business becomes incorporated you must file within 90 days of that date. For subsequent years you need to register between 1/1 and 4/1 – every year.

If your business is an LLC – limited liability company, or limited partnership or foreign corporation you will not file as above. You will file your first corporate registration between 1/1 and 4/1 of the year following the year your Georgia business was incorporated. For subsequent years you will file between 1/1 and 4/1.

Does that clear it up the annual registration process a little bit? We hope so!

Georgia Incorporation FAQ: Changing Corporation Officers

If you have already incorporated your Georgia corporation and you have a need to change the officers listed in the official documents, how do you go about it?

This is another case where you can simply file a Georgia corporation annual registration for $30 (currently). In addition to this, at the same time, you can change the address of the corporation.

According to Georgia laws, a Limited Liability Company only needs to list the “registered agent”. So, officers for the Georgia company are not listed on the corporate documents. There is no need to change the officers, only the registered agent in this case. Other business entities need to have officers changed.

This can all be accomplished online.

7 Reasons PPC (Pay Per Click) is So Great?

Pay Per Click is an online technique where you advertise your site with text, images, videos or other multi-media advertisement on websites other than your own.

When someone clicks on your ad – you pay a fee to the broker. Adwords / Adsense is Google’s PPC network.

1. You can bid pennies for some keywords that will put you at the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. You only pay for clicks on your ad, not people reading them. You are accomplishing some level of branding even though you’re not paying anything.

3. Google is good about eliminating invalid clicks, automated bot-clicks, and other scams. In fact, if you click on your own ads – or if your friends do, you might find your Adsense accounts terminated. (Adsense allows website owners to run advertisers ads on their sites – making money from clicks that occur on their site).

4. Using tracking you can see which keywords you’re bidding on lead to actual sales, and how much you make on the sales. You can figure out which keywords are most important to bid on – and adjust the amount you bid to match the importance for your business.

5. Adwords PPC is found working not only at Google SERPs, but at many sites across the planet. All those ads you see on websites that have Google’s name listed on them are from PPC advertising campaigns.

6. Adwords PPC has some tools that make it very easy to find valuable keywords for your business niche. It’s not unheard of to have 2,000 keywords you’re bidding on! Remember, the long-tail keywords are going to be the most important in terms of sales… if you’re selling baby diapers, the term “diapers” is very general and you might have one order per 100 clicks. The phrase “buy baby diapers online” is much more long-tail, but might lead to sales 1 out of every 10 clicks.

7. If you’re bidding against others for a keyword Google will optimize your bid so that the amount you’ve agree to pay, say, 10 cents per click is the maximum you’ll pay. You might pay just 6 cents if the top bid someone else used is 5 cents. Google will make your bid only one cent over the highest bid up to your maximum bid amount for each keyword.

I know some companies making a killing off the Google Adwords PPC program. One in particular is making over $2,000 per day clear from their PPC efforts. They have over 100,000 keywords in their campaign, and are dedicated to it full-time. But, it goes to show what kind of success is possible. It’s a channel worth exploring for every business – online or offline. If you’re offline you can create ads for online and have a click lead to one page with your phone number so interested customers can call you.

PPC is one of the business world’s ultimate money making tools. Get to know how to use it like an expert by taking a PPC elearning course online.

Too Much Competition Online? Not in Georgia.

I was looking through an online business journal and reading articles like I do a lot. I thought I’d have a look at the online Georgia businesses for sale, so I looked at the available Business to Consumer businesses that were currently for sale.

I found just 10.

In ALL of Georgia. Ten. Is that saying anything to you? Because it says volumes to me. Here is one of the biggest online business journals in existence and Georgia has a whole lot of people that could be starting their own businesses… and there are just 10 online B2C businesses for sale in the whole state.

Online business is so simple to start and really not that difficult to make money at. Are people in Georgia continuing to create traditional brick and mortar businesses and just aren’t comfortable with using the internet for business yet?

I was floored. In this economy I expected to see 100 online businesses – probably more, for sale in the whole state.

To be fair I’ve not yet looked at other states – will do that in a minute…

If you’re reading this and you haven’t started your own online business – seriously consider choosing something and getting started. The peace of mind you’ll eventually have for creating, building and running your own successful business is something that is worth every minute you put into it.

Don’t forget to incorporate your new Georgia business with us here.

« Previous Page