10 things to help your small business grow

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Posted on 25th August 2010 by admin in Marketing |Marketing Online |Social Blogging |Technology

1. Let Someone Else Go First

If you’re a small business, you don’t want to be putting your money on a horse that may or may not have longevity. To top it off, solutions should already be tested out fully with someone else’s money and time. The key is to jump in at the very end of the early adopter phase.

2. Keep the Bottom Line in Mind

Every piece of technology you buy, should help you increase your bottom line somehow. Whether it’s through efficiency or through expanding services, it’s got be able to pay you back. Just because something is faster, the latest version, or prettier than what you currently own, doesn’t make it a good buying decision. You might even intimidate customers who have to learn the new systems.

3. Use Open Source

Open source technology can be comparable in features to private software packages. There is no support for open source, but there are also no licensing fees.

4. Set Up Social Networking and Forget It

It is important to have an account on Twitter and Facebook, amongst many other sites. The account is free and can generate massive attention and buzz for your offerings. However, you want to schedule your tweets and automate as much of this as possible to cut down on the time spent doing it.

5. Convert Paper to Digital

A paper newsletter put online can save you tons of money on paper and mailing costs. What you may not know is the same is true with coupons. You can convert those to electronic coupons and the customer can download them off your site, saving your distribution and printing costs.

6. Upgrade your phones to voip PBX

Partnering with companies like Vocalocity can help save you as much as 50%-80% on your current phone bill while gaining features to help your customer interaction that were once only available to Fortune 500 companies

7. Cut Down on Travel Costs

You can set up VOIP lines and teleconferencing to avoid the expense of traveling when you have more than one business office or clients in different locations.

8. Read the Reviews

Before buying any piece of technology check the reviews it got. It will help you decide whether it’s going to work for you or not.

9. Automate Your Help and Customer Service Areas

Some of this can be done simply by putting up an FAQ online for the questions that most people ask, and thus cutting down on phone calls. Other times you may want to put in a help desk system.

10. Leverage the WWW

Use the free resources that are available to help network,Brand, and create loyal customers to compete with the bigger companies. The social networking frenzy is only growing and being able to create your spot in space will only help grow and retain your customers.

Conference Group brings your company together

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Posted on 26th June 2010 by admin in Marketing Online |Social Blogging |Technology

Companies are discovering that in order to survive in today’s economical climate they must rethink how they do business. This not only pertains to how they go to market but how they communicate with their employees and customers. Using the power of the internet and broadband capabilities, companies can now communicate through a multi-media platform that will have more impact than a conference call or email can ever have. Perhaps even more than an in person conference as the members will not be exhausted from travel fatigue.
Our organization uses web and video conferencing regularly in order to provide product updates, training, and sales updates to everyone in the company. Your teams will have better retention of the material and motivation will be higher after they get off the conference that can translate into more productivity. Companies like the Conference Group can help provide the platform and support to easily and effectively hold a web conference to help you engage your employees. With both audio and visual presentations your employees will be able to have clear understanding of what is being asked of them and what they are responsible for.
With the Conference Group you can effectively launch and implement a live web conference for much less than it would cost to have people travel to a meeting and for your company to host that meeting. Plus the advantages of having both audio and visual presentations will help keep your participants engaged in what they are learning about. We have all participated in conference calls that in most cases can be sufficiently effective. If more in-depth information and interaction is required, then conferencing through their ReadyShow® is the answer. In this way, participants can access the web conference from any computer with a meeting code and password, easily joining others while also watching the same presentation or information display. The facilitators can then control the media and participation through simple controls that they will have access too. This type of medium allows tremendous professional sharing of information, files, and applications in order to make the whole web conferencing experience more engaging and in the end have more impact than a simple conference call.

What about your performance review

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Posted on 22nd June 2010 by admin in Education |Social Blogging

In most organizations June and July are about the times that mid year reviews are done to assess the progress of their employees. For sales organizations it is pretty simple since most are looking at the month sales goals and then other development factors. The problem with most performance reviews is that they only take place twice a year. A new book out called Managing (Right) for the First Time deals with this situation and its author David C. Baker helps managers understand that a performance review should be an ongoing discussion. He uses his experience in talking with over 500 small businesses to help newly appointed managers and those that have been in their roles for a while to understand the performance review with their employees. This can help employees stay on tract to meet their performance objectives and then there are no surprises at the end of the year.
I have been on those year end reviews when a person is shocked that they did not get a fully met and part of this responsibility lies with the manager to help coach and lead them through out the year and provide more constant feedback on their performance. The performance can be a time to motivate employees but can end up being a heated debate on ones views of another performance. So don’t let opportunities to discuss updates with your employees on a monthly basis pass you by and take the time to invest in your people more than twice a year. You can read a great intro on the book at http://www.firstmanagers.com and understand why we as managers can sometimes be off the mark when it comes to giving our people feedback.

Finding accessories for HTC cell phones

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Posted on 26th April 2010 by admin in Social Blogging |Technology

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A great place to look for all your cell phone accessories can be found at one place and that one place is thinkhd2.com. They have a great selection of HTC HD2 Accessories that can help protect and enhance your new phone. I really like the fact they have a huge selection of things to choose from and they even have some things I didn’t know you could even get for a cell phone. You don’t have to look no place else the next time you get ready to find some new Cell Phone Accessories for your phone. You will see that these guys pretty much have everything!

I like how easy it was to find my cell phone accessory ; when browsing through all the different HTC HD2 Cell Phones they have listed on their page. They have pictures to help you quickly find the exact accessory you’re using for any of the popular brands like HTC, Samsung, Blackberry, Nokia and other brands that you know very well too. You can view various HTC Accessories with pictures and descriptions in order to find the right one for you. You get to see two views of the phone while it is open and one picture shows you what the phone looks like when it is closed. With many of the new phone now offering touch screen functionality it is very important to have the right case or protective screen in order to get the most life out of your new phone. These devices are so integrated into how we communicate that even being without your phone for a few hours can be very disruptive so that is why choosing the right accessories can be critical.

Help your website make headlines

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Posted on 19th March 2010 by admin in Marketing Online |Social Blogging

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An SEO (search engine optimization) company can fix your website up so that you will get more visitors than your competitors and increase web traffic. If they have the chance to see your products or services first, then they might not ever know that your competitors even exist. There are so many ways that you can make your website “search engine friendly” and many of the SEO companies know how to do this.

The trick to the whole process is to get your website to appear on as many search results as possible and choosing the right key words, implementing meta tags, and submitting your website to the right places, can get your website to appear in more search engine results.

ThinkBIGsites is a place you can go for search engine placement. These guys can do a check on your website and find the best ways to optimize it for the search engines. Now a lot of companies promise that they can get you into hundreds of different search engines. Don’t concern yourself with hundreds, when some say that there really isn’t no where near that many, when you can focus on the main ones. The big search engines like  Google, Yahoo, and MSN and now Bing;  are the big boys and if you can get noticed by them, then your on your way to more traffic! So try to focus on these search engines first, before you try to get on other search engines.

As soon as you get your website optimization plan going, you will see a big difference on the search results for your website.

Once you start to see that the search engines are picking up your website, then your goal is to move to the first page on search results. Most people never look at the 2nd page of search results from a search engine. So being on the first page is crucial to getting more people to your website. Keeping your website up-to-date and adding fresh and relative content to it, will maximize your efforts and help you to climb to higher positions on the search engine results. There is a lot of information that you can find out about getting better search engine results. Take the time to learn some of the tricks to getting your website in more search engine results and find a company like thinkbigsites.com.com to help fine tune your website. So be like the grocery store that has the big sign and all the advertisements and get an SEO company on your side today!