Irunabiz: Technology

IRUNABIZ:Technology has gone mobile!!

Jeff Spiller — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:06:12 +0000

I’ve now caught up with the year 2010 and created a mobile version of this site. (Thanks to the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.) Mobile computing via a web enabled phones is one of the fasted growing consumer trends. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve be in the car looking up stuff on my iPhone (while my wife drives). If you are in the retail business, a mobile site is a great way to get to your potential customers while they are actually looking for your business.

Anyhow, enjoy the mobile version of the site.

Social Media Has to be Viral to Grow Your Business

Jeff Spiller — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:11:46 +0000

What is your social media doing for you ?
You’ve got your Facebook fan page, a twitter account and a blog. You post blog updates, product announcements, and specials to Facebook and Twitter. You have links on your emails and website to your social media pages. You have social media covered right ? No, all you have is yet another method of transmitting information to your existing customers and prospects, you could just as easily send them emails (and it would probably be more effective since tweets, and wall updates tend to get lost in the stream of information on social media sites). If all you want to is be hip, and you have the resources to do it, this is fine. But, if you want to actually use social media to reach out to new prospects you need to make it viral.

How do you get social media to be viral and grow your business ?
You need to have some percentage of your tweets, and wall posting re-tweeted, recommended, and referenced so people who wouldn’t otherwise see them will. Thats the viral part. So how are you going to do this? Build a relationship:

Don’t just tweet promotional info, nobody watches TV just for the ads (except perhaps the Super Bowl) They watch it for entertainment and information. Add personal, general business, and industry information that may interest your customers and prospects.
Get in the conversation. Reply to to comments, tweets/postings, answer questions, do it regularly and frequently (multiple times per day).
Manage your reputation, negative information should be responded to immediately. Figure out how to make your critics your fans.
Collaborate with others in your industry to extend reach. (Contests, cross promotions, recommendations, etc.)
Commit to it. Social media is a long term investment; If you drop it after a short time you won’t get a decent return.

As you can see there is a significant commitment of time and effort to get social media to work. But if your prospects and customers are using social media it can pay off.

Related Posts:

3 Free Cloud Based CRM packages

Jeff Spiller — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:00:22 +0000

Keeping Track of your customers and prospects is critical for a small business. The following web based applications offer free CRM functionality.

Highrise 250 contacts and one login with the free version.

FreeCrm 5 logins and advertising with the free version.

Zoho CRM 3 logins with the free version.

Why Small Business Needs Clould Computing

Jeff Spiller — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:13:24 +0000

I read an article today on Forbes today about ‘Why Cloud Computing Matters to Small Biz’ and it reminded my about a story from my past that supports the point made in the article.

About 8 years ago a partner and I put together plan to start what would be now be called a cloud application. (Back then the term “cloud” hadn’t been coined in its current form, so it was just a “web-based” application.) As part of this project, I had to put together a business plan which included hardware and networking expenditures. Obviously, for a ‘web-based application’ we needed servers, network infrastructure, a fractional T3 (pipe to the web). Those costs were significant; they included $25,000 in servers, $2000 in network infrastructure and, $5000 per month for Internet, and this didn’t even include rent for a place to keep it all. And for all that, there was no redundancy, and every 5 new customers we would have to outlay another $10,000 for more servers. This was lot of money for 2 guys without jobs to come up with.

To do the same thing today, I can go to GoGrid, Force.com, Amazon web services or any other cloud based infrastructure provider, and set it up for a fraction of the cost. On top of that, the costs are completely tied to usage so I don’t have to outlay a lot of funds up front while I wait for my customers’ monthly fees to cover the cost. (Great for cash flow!!). In addition I have, backups, redundancy, and network bandwidth that can grow with the business.

Needless to say, the cloud creates opportunities for business that just a few years ago were out of reach. (By the way, that business never got off the drawing board for a multitude of reasons)

How do you think the cloud can help or hurt small business ?

4 ways to get more customers to your door

Jeff Spiller — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:51:32 +0000

You customers don’t use the yellow pages to find you anymore, they use the web. I have listed four major directories you need to be listed in. These are the ‘yellow pages’ of the 2010’s. If you’re not listed in these directories, not only do you run the risk of being invisible to your customers, your competitors can ‘hijack’ your listings and steal your customers from you.

Google Local. The 800 pound gorilla of everything Internet. With a listing here, your company will show up on local searches on the web, and on cell phones. It also helps to ensure that when someone types your business name into Google, they will get accurate information.
Bing Local Listing Center. Bing is currently a chihuahua nipping at Google’s heels. But, you should never underestimate Microsoft with billions of dollars to spend on marketing their new search product.
Yahoo Local. While not the behemoth it was 10 years ago, Yahoo still has significant reach — especially with all those yahoo mail users.
Yelp. Yelp is not a search engine per se, its a group of listings with comments and ratings. If Yelp covers your area, and users are commenting on your industry and/or business, you need to claim your listing respond to comments.

Not only are these directories available on your potential customers’ desktops, they are also on your customer’s mobile phones. Making sure you are listed gives you a better chance of being found in the home and on the road.

Are you invisible to potential customers?

What do you think about local search ?

Book Review: Toilet Paper Entrepreneur

Jeff Spiller — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:32:12 +0000

Toilet Paper Entrepreneur ‡

Since its after Christmas, and you are probably flush with a bit of holiday cash, and you are ready to start on a new business endeavor…how about about spending some of that money on a book? The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is small book (175 pages) that cover a lot of ground about starting a business.

Ok, before I start, why might you ask would I review a business book on a tech site? Two reason: first, most computer books are boring, you probably wouldn’t want to read them even if they were ‘good’. Second, this book is peppered with tips about how to use tech to help run your business on a shoestring budget.

The book’s primary focus is small ‘bootstrapped’ start-ups. If you are planning a $5MM venture round, while some of the techniques in the book could be useful, you are probably not the focus of this book. On the other hand, if you’ve got an idea for a small business, or you are running small business this book may be for you.

The first two sections of the book cover motivation, and creating a vision of where you want your business to go, while the second part deals with a more nuts and bolts approach to running your business. If you are just getting started running your business, or trying to decide where you want to go with a business, this book could be very helpfull to you. Be warned, the author, Mike Michalowicz uses some crude language, so it’s not for the under 16 set, but its very easy to read, and he is able explain concepts well.

Here is the tech tie in, throughout the book there are gray boxes with TPE TIPS, a good number of them deal with Internet tools to help you run your business. Its like a getting an extra bonus in your book.

Whether you get the book or not, the author also has a blog that’s worth reading.

Buy this book at Amazon‡

Using the Internet to Grow your Business

Jeff Spiller — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:25:57 +0000

Sometimes the Internet can open up whole new markets for you. I had the opportunity to talk to a gentleman who runs a small company that provides hand’s-on training for specialized industrial equipment. He sets up training classes all over the country. About 3 months ago he decided to jump into web based training. He hired a company to make high quality training videos, and a programmer to initially setup his site. He priced his classes at a very low price point, and after just one month of being live, he is thrilled with the outcome. In that time he has gotten more new customers than he gets in 4 months for his traditional classes. He told me that he has been able to reach a whole new demographic of customers, (younger, more computer literate). Because of his low price point (under $50.00), if his customers can’t get their employers to pay for the class, many are willing to pay out of their own pockets.

What’s the moral of this story–If you have a business that’s not web based, stop, look around, and see if you can expand your business with web based technology. Technology that was very expensive just 5 years ago is now very affordable. Technologies like web 2.0, cloud computing, and video are high quality and easily within reach of almost any business. Take a few minutes today and think about what you could do for your business, and then see if you can make it happen. Its probably cheaper and easier then you could ever imagine.

4 Sites Worth Reading for Tech News and Info

Jeff Spiller — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:16:33 +0000

Here are 4 sites worth for reading for tech news if your not a techie and are running a business:

smallbiztechnology.com. As its name indicates, this is a blog that deals with technology for small business. It has lots and news and tips.

CNET. CNET provides tech news and information in a very non-techie friendly format.

ZDNet. More technical than CNet, but worth a regular review.

irunabiz.com. For obvious reasons.

Leave a comment and let me know what sites you like to read.

Domain Name for Sale: SOLUTIONS4JOBS.COM

Jeff Spiller — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:21:24 +0000

I used it briefly for a blog about 6 months ago, but its been dormant since then. It’s is currently registered with goDaddy. If you are interested, email domains@solutions4tech.com

Are you invisible to potential customers?

Jeff Spiller — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:26:38 +0000

According to a one research study I read about recently, nearly 40% of small business do not have a website. If you are one of these businesses you are invisible to the nearly 220 million US Internet users. It’s like having a retail store with no sign, your ARE loosing potential business. Keep in mind that my Grandmother’s 85 year old boyfriend has figured out how to look thinks up on Google, so there are a lot more potential customers on the web then you might think. You need something, it doesn’t have to be large, expensive, or complicated, but you do need something. (Understand that having a website doesn’t mean you will be found — that involves advertising and specialized site design, but not having a site 100% guarantees that you won’t be found!)

Other than presence on the web, what are some of the advantages of having a website?

It makes your company appear more legitimate.
You can use your web address on marketing materials and advertising to point people to more information about your company.
If you start listing your business in on-line directories, you can point to your site for more information.
Someday (soon) the yellow pages will go away.

What do you do next?

1. Register a domain name. If at all possible get a .com, but .biz addresses are good too.

2. Find a web host. Microsoft Office Live will host your site for free (yes, free). They also have templates you can use to build the site. Currently I use GoDaddy.com‡ for my site and blog.

3. Design your site. Most hosting companies offer either free or paid packages to help you design your site.

(By the way, when you setup your hosting, you can usually setup an email address that uses your domain name. Do that. Nothing screams ‘fly-by-night’ more than an @hotmail, @gmail, @aol, or @yahoo address for a business)

If you don’t want to do it yourself, hire someone to do it for you (like my company‡), it won’t be that expensive, and it will be worth it in the long run.

Resources

Solutions4Tech for for Website Design (Thats me!)‡

GoDaddy.com for domain registration and hosting‡

Microsoft Office Live