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.

Mobile Broadband for the student

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Posted on 24th August 2010 by admin in Blogging Online |Technology

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Students always have a tough time browsing through the end-less plans provided by broadband service providers, to find a suitable plan that will not gulp too much of their budget, yet help them stay connected to the virtual world faster. The major problem faced by most of the students is that they are unsure about the period of stay at a place. Here are certain things that you must ponder before you get set for the deal.

The first, and the foremost thing that you must consider is the period of stay at a place. This helps you to decide between a contract deal and a non-contract deal. If you are quiet unsure about a full-twelve months stay at a place, then it is always better to skip off the option of twelve months contracts and save yourself from the cancellation fee later. Most Mobile Broadband providers are now offering free laptops to those that sign up for a 1-2 year contract which could be attractive to man students. But while opting for a non-contract deal, the packages may be more expensive and there could be an activation fee. Besides, you may not get a free modem or a router. On the other hand, if you are going to stay for a period beyond twelve months, some broadband providers offers you student broadband packages.

Another useful option is to choose a mobile broadband option. As long as you have a Mobile USB sticks and USB modems, you can access the internet by plugging these into your laptops. This has become a well-known method of accessing internet these days. Students can use it wherever they go, to the coffee shops, to the students’ house or to home when they go. Another asset with the mobile broadband is the lack of line rental. Also, no unwanted tensions over the cost sharing with your room mates. But, mobile broadband comes with limited download options like 3GB to 5GB.

If you are a student, who owns a mobile phone contract, it is always advisable to choose the cheap broadband offers provided by your mobile phone service provider, rather than choosing a new broadband service provider. You should also check sites like Broadband genie for some of the best mobile broadband deals on the internet. By this you can save a great deal of money. You can use their site to research, compare, and grab a great deal for your mobile broadband needs. Furthermore, most of the broadband service providers offer you with broadband bundles. That is, to opt for internet packages that offer you all services together, including TV, Phone and Internet.

Improve your computer security

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Posted on 20th August 2010 by admin in Education |Technology

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The World Wide Web is growing a little bigger each day and each day we see a greater need for internet security. A new virus appears daily and with each new virus we need the best possible virus protection we can find online. Surfing around on the computer without an anti-virus program on your computer is just asking for trouble. You may get away with it for awhile, but there is bound to be a virus that will set up shop in your computer system. A computer virus can cause frequent crashes and slow down the speed it takes to load a new page. Eventually the virus can bog down our computers to the point we no longer have control. This can really be frustrating and expensive to fix too. You can save a lot of time and money by adding a good anti virus program now. Don’t wait for your system to start shutting down, because this can be too late sometimes. Taking a little time now to protect your computer can save you a lot of time and aggravation in the future.

I would also recommend finding programs that remove spyware or malware that collects on our systems. One such company that can provide help and resources to help in this matter is Security Sharp which unlike many companies who are just out to sell some piece of software they offer some very simple and easy tutorials on how to look for and rid your PC of spyware/malware.  We actually had a chance to try out their site and we found some great bits of information that help us make our Firefox browser more secure. They are a security firm that is out to help everyone eliminate and reduce the computer threats that are just lurking one click away. They provide secure downloads to some of the best malware/spyware programs that we use on our laptop and PC which are Malware Bytes and Ad Aware. This programs can help identify loopholes that virus programs may not catch on their scan and will help reduce the amount of annoying pop-ups. They even have a great tutorial on both firefox and IE on how to make your web browser safer and more secure. This can create a lot of havoc and greatly reduce the performance of our computers.

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.

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.

Win a Colorware Digg styled iPad from TapTapTap

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Posted on 28th March 2010 by admin in Blogging Online |Technology

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You have a chance to win the new iPad that has been tricked out from  ColorWare for a limited edition. This is a great way to learn about what taptaptap has to offer in the way of Apps for the iPhone and they are using the twitter social world to help promote their newest Digg iphone app. We stumbled upon this great viral marketing opportunity from TapTapTap and felt we should share it with our readers. Here is what you have to tweet and then follow @taptaptap and that is you are entered:

  • the free @digg app’s here for iphone! to celebrate they’re giving out a custom colorware ipad each day for 2 weeks! http://bit.ly/diggapp

They are doing this to help promote their new free Digg App which does:

“The Digg app is finally here for your iPhone or iPod touch! Digg and view top stories, read comments, save stories for reading later, and do it all in a sleek interface with one tap from your home screen. It’s all the stuff you care about on the internet, now elegantly presented in mobile form.” We are going to be tweeting and blogging about this great contest for the next few weeks to help our readers stay in tune with what is happening. You can follow our Tweets at @traffexone and stay on top of some great ways to use your new iPad.  So the competition will heat up as iPad’s begin to ship next week and we will read about the advantages and glitches through our new iPhone app for Digg. There is a great explanation at taptaptap.com where you can read about the free app that is now available to download for your iPhone.

Microsoft Access Training benefits

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Posted on 26th February 2010 by admin in Marketing Online |Technology

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In the world of creating and using databases using Microsoft Access is one that is rather simple to learn, but provides some great tools and data manipulation for most users. If you need of brushing up on your knowledge or learning some new skills then getting Microsoft Access training online should be a top priority. At BestTraining they offer over 85 courses on Microsoft Access Training. These are MS Access certified trainers, so you can be assured that you are getting genuine advice and learnings. We use Access in some of our daily database management tools to create and maintain some of CRM data. I originally taught my self on MS Access about two years ago, reading through the larger books and picking out different scripting language to build and customize some of our databases. I started off using some of the basic tables, and forms fields to create and manage customer interactions. We also piped in Excel spreadsheets for orders and service requests. These all rolled into weekly and monthly reports that we used to help identify certain hot topics and problems across our services.

After taking some of the actual onsite courses, I was amazed at just how much more I could do without having to rely on outside programmers. there is no substitute for live training where you can interact with others to answer questions and provide real life scenarios. The instructors we had were great in their ability to make the content real life and not as technical. This was helpful, when idea to capture certain data, or have a certain report run, I no longer had to wait on others to get the proper coding done. I was even able through some of the advanced online learning’s, get a handle and successfully implement SQL queries and improve on our relational databases.

Access makes it very easy for those that do not wish to creat SQL language, by allowing simple to follow features, such as the table look up feature. We found this helpful when joining several tables that actually had to look up themselves to relate the data for different subsets.It is very important to name the tables with the extension such as “tblcustomers”, “frmscustomers”, as a good naming technique. We found this out early on a certainly saves a lot of time when cross referincing tables to forms, so we knew which were which.

Another key learining we got through our Microsoft Access training was that when using Access online we needed to make sure that we regularly optimized our databases to reduce the load on the server, and make sure there was minimal lag time in processing the customers request. Some of our earlier attempts created too many links and refernces so the table and lookups were not very efficient causing some serious lag time for our customers. So choosing function over fashion was definitely a lesson well learned. Here are some the pointers that have helped us streamline our tables:

1)Try and use several long tables rather than one wide (many fields) table.

2) Try to avoid AutoNumber fields when creating Primary Keys for a table. But rather use one or more data fields for this purpose.

3) Use Lookup lists with a link to lookup table linked to the main table for text fields.
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Free Ringtones and Games

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Posted on 11th May 2009 by admin in Blogging Online |Technology

It is time to stop paying for ringtones and games for your cell phone. Get Free Ringtones, Games and Backgrounds for your Cell Phone! A new rewards site has just launch that. They require no credit card, no subscription fees. I know you are asking, “Nothing is free?” CellRewards.com is able to give away free ringtones, games and backgrounds for cell phones by simple having members complete simple offers like taking a survey, requesting free information or printing a coupon.

That is it, and you get access to latest artists and games for your cell phone. So go ahead and impress your friends with the latest of OUtBreak 3D, and let them know that you got it for free.

Control your business services remotely

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Posted on 18th October 2006 by admin in B2B |Technology

Small businesses can now be competitive with Managed Services Software For $9.95/pc per month, small IT firms can use hosted software without the need to invest $12K- $15K upfront in hopes to get a return on investment.  It allows IT professionals to remotely control any windows based PC, install critical security patches and software, without having to be on site.

SecureMyCompany provides Kaseya Software which allows small companies to remain competitive while providing a secure environment for their PCs SecureMyCompany offers McAfees Total Protection for small businesses  that incorporates antispyware, antivirus, and firewall in one product for a small additional fee. All of their services integrate seamlessly across your network to help facilitate easy installation and functionality.