Owners ask: What are the advantages of cloud computing for a small business or startup?
Imagine this scenario (and it’s not uncommon): An office worker wants to start her own business. She decides to try affiliate marketing. She finds a product she believes in and researches its affiliate marketing program. It uses one of the major online-affiliate programs. She heads over to Squarespace, creates an account and designs an ecommerce site using one of its templates. Looking sell more in the future, she’ll set up a credit card account with Stripe because it integrates easily with Squarespace. For the immediate future, because she’s an affiliate, the vendor will do all the shipping. This is about as simple as an online business can be, but it demonstrates many of the advantages of cloud computing for a small business. For example, she didn’t have to hire anyone or even get help from a consultant. Let’s list some more: She was in business in a matter of hours. She could easily scale her business and add other products. Squarespace and Stripe are essentially responsible for keeping up with best security practices and providing backups. She didn’t personally own any hardware that could go down. She could easily change her line of products. She didn’t have to make a large initial investment. I used founding a small ecommerce site for my example, but all of the productivity and cost-effectiveness attributes I listed apply to almost any business using a cloud service. When you consider a cloud service, half of the benefits are the service you get and half of the benefits are the headaches you don’t get. (This ratio changes depending on the specific cloud service being discussed!) The following short list features cloud computing services that have proved themselves to be deliver advantages to small business owners. Office 365. As much as we love to hate Microsoft, its Office 365 has proven to be a real winner with small and medium-sized businesses. You get cloud-based storage, all of the Microsoft Office software (including updates). One business subscription lets you install the software on five devices and with its cloud storage you those five devices can access and edit your documents from virtually anywhere. Basecamp. Keep everyone on the same page with this project management cloud service. Many small businesses depend on Basecamp and one of its best features is its ease of use. Google docs. If you don’t want the expense of Office 365 or don’t feel like you’re tied to the Microsoft Office applications, Google Docs, with its related Google Drive is a great choice. You can author and edit documents online, or download them. It can easily work with documents created by the Microsoft Office software suite. Dropbox. This convenient cloud storage system makes every article or list that discusses the advantages of cloud computing for a small business. A basic, free account gets you two gigs of cloud storage that you can access just like another folder on your computer. Salesforce. With Salesforce we’re moving beyond computing basics and into a specialized cloud-based application. Salesforce gives small businesses extremely powerful customer relationship management tools, such as custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, real-time data sharing, basic customer service and more. This gives you and your team the ability to “multiply yourselves” and compete with bigger organizations. Sage Live. Since I mentioned Salesforce, I need...
read more3 Paths to Passive Income Through Affiliate Marketing
There’s never any shortage of people interested in finding the best ideas for passive income businesses, and successful affiliate marketing programs are certainly among the top candidates. But anyone who has made an attempt at establishing an affiliate marketing business that actually makes some money knows that it’s not easy to accomplish. You can work like crazy and invest a lot of time establishing a blog or website and ever get the passive income source of your dreams. I suppose that one way to discover a successful affiliate marketing business is just to try one thing after another until you hit something that works. But starting out with a good strategy will, in the long run, be less frustrating and more rewarding. If this has been a dream of yours, here are three strategies that will help you, as an individual, find what may be the best affiliate program based passive income business. Affiliate marketing success There is one key to success in affiliate marketing – traffic. Some small percentage of your traffic will buy through the affiliate links you post on your website. This will prove to be a fairly constant number, so any increase in traffic will translate to an increase in your passive income. The riddle then becomes how to get the traffic. 1. Find something new. When a new product becomes available in an affiliate program, there aren’t as many competitors in cyberspace trying to lure in prospective buyers. This makes life easier on you. If you’re quick enough, you can even grab an exact-match domain name, like “polkadotwidgets.com.” The Rakuten/Linkshare Affiliate Network, for example, makes it easy to find companies who are presenting new affiliate offers. 2. Niche curation. This strategy requires two things: You need to define a very narrow area of interest, and You need to establish your authority. You could, for example, become the go-to person for hot sauce recipes and then sell the various brands of hot sauces that you use in your recipes. The sauces and spices you use should be rather hard to find so that your fans will prefer the convenience of buying through your website over tracking down the ingredients on their own. This strategy is idea if you’re already passionate and knowledgeable about something. 3. Ask Google what you should sell. If you already have a blog, start running AdWords ads on it and see what kind of ads Google places on your site. That will tell you what Google thinks your visitors are interested in, and hey, Google knows quite a lot about the people who read your blog. Keep track of the products and services that Google features on your pages for a while. See how you can categorize them and then start looking for those products and services in the popular affiliate marketing programs. Also, don’t forget that some companies run their own in-house affiliate programs – if you can’t find a product you think would work well for you offered through one of the third-party affiliate programs, go straight to the company itself. Passive income success and SEO There is one more very important requirement if you want to establish a stream of passive income through the affiliate program model: You need to be good at small business search engine optimization...
read moreCollaborating at a distance: The best project management tools and techniques
Much is being written about distance employees, freelancers and virtual assistants. The advantages of using these kinds of employees or contractors in your small business are many. However, there can be as many pitfalls as advantages if the small business owner isn’t careful. It’s easy to fall into the trap captured in the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.” You need to be sure that you are collaborating well and in many ways that means powering your small business with the best project management tools and techniques. Let me start by discussing the best project management techniques in this situation. I can’t stress the importance of communication too strongly. When you’re working with a anyone at a distance, it poses all kinds of communication problems. People can’t read your body language and they don’t have enough personal exposure to you to “anticipate” what you’re tying to say. This really means that people at a distance have a hard time grasping the full depth of what you want to communicate. Another obstacle here is that the person who is at a distance will have distractions that you are unaware of. If you were dealing with someone working in the same office, you would know immediately if that person was too distracted to give you his or her full attention and you’d just come back later. You won’t know this with a distance worker. It may seem like you have the worker’s attention, when in reality, you don’t You need to use more than one channel to communicate with your distance workers: Email, Chat, Voice or video, and A cloud-based project management system. I’ll mention a few of the best software project management systems in a moment, but first let’s look at the other forms of communication. Email. When you have a lot to discuss, commit it to an email and be sure you and your employees have their email well organized. Create a folder system. In some email systems – Outlook, for example – you can create tags. In Gmail you can create labels. Chat. Slack is a chat service designed for work teams. Slack allows you to organize communication into channels and everything is searchable. Collaboration is its strong suit. If you have team members who are not under the same roof, but need to work together as if they are, give Slack a spin. Voice or video. Virtually every freelancer and virtual assistant I’ve worked with has used Skype, so if you’re going to jump into that world, grab a Skype account. It works as an instant messenger, phone service and video-phone service. People are starting to use Google Hangouts for meetings. These are video sessions that offer a lot of flexibility. For instance you can also message, share screens and change the camera between people speaking. Further, every session is recorded and available via your YouTube channel. There are a number of good software services to check out as you search for the best project management tools and techniques. I use Basecamp because it’s powerful yet not too complicated. Others worth a look are Asana and Trello. A basic Asana account for as many as 15 team members is free. Basecamp offers its first “basecamp” for free and then has three paid packages: $29 per...
read moreHow to reduce cycle times, improve quality, boost profits
Right now there are a lot of memes making the rounds in the social media that poke fun at Ikea. The general idea of most of them is to tease the Swedish furniture maker about all the instructions users have to follow in order to assemble the items they’ve purchased. Honestly, although Ikea instructions (and names) are rather cryptic, they do a pretty good job of showing people how to put their items together. However, it doesn’t always feel that way at the time! This puts a focus on the concept of how to reduce cycle times in your small business. By this, I mean the necessity of reducing processes down to their fewest number of steps, organizing them ideally and therefore accomplishing things more quickly. Further, when you lower the number of steps in a process and reduce the cycle time, you eliminate the number of places where your employees can make errors. In many cases you’ll also find that you can reduce materials and paperwork. Add all of these efficiencies up and they equal greater profitability in your small business. The enemy of reducing cycle times in your small business is the we’ve-always-done-it-that-way mindset. The principle of reducing cycle times is one of the cornerstones of traditional manufacturing quality assurance, but it’s a principle that can be applied to virtually any business, including small business service companies. Pick the low-hanging fruit Take a fresh set of eyes to review your processes. If they haven’t been documented, get that done and be sure that no one leaves out any step they do. When things become habit, we do them without thinking; don’t let these steps escape your documentation process! Eliminate redundancies. When two or more departments have to work together to accomplish something in a small business, they often duplicate one another’s work. Down deep, they just don’t trust the other group or person. Principle: Do it right the first time and you don’t have to do it a second time. Get your entire team involved in these reviews. Look for paperwork that gets filled out but never looked at again. Cut the red tape. Streamline timing There are a variety of strategies that help you complete tasks more quickly. Review the sequences that you use. Can they be reordered to make them more efficient? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Switch things up. One of the most important things you’re doing when you start on a journey to find how to reduce cycle times is to get people thinking differently and accepting new ideas. Ask questions like, “Who are you always waiting on for them to finish their work?” Find out where the bottlenecks are and propose creative ways to eliminate them. Maybe having some materials “pre-staged” would greatly improve throughput. If your processes all seem to be linearly organized – A then B then C then D – look for processes that can be done in parallel. Maybe two departments can be working on a project or product at the same time, then everything would come together at the end. Systemize, automate, outsource Above I said that you must systemize and document your processes. However, don’t see this as something that is done once and you’re finished with it. Your documents should be constantly updated as your...
read moreSmall Business DIY Marketing Tip: Create a Custom ‘National Day’
I don’t know if this is ironic or merely appropriate, but someone made up the special day, “Make Your Own Holiday Day,” and it falls on March 26 of every year. Whatever else it might be, for small business owners it’s certainly a reminder that if handled properly, you can get a lot of free publicity by creating your own special day. Further, in most cases it doesn’t take an act of Congress to get a special day on one of the calendars that keeps track of those things. Let me give you the places to propose your special day right now and then we’ll discuss some ways you can use your custom special day to get some publicity for yourself. Here are the places to submit or register your special day application: Chase’s Calendar of Events, and Online National Day Calendar. If you know of others, mention them in the comments below! Keys for free publicity As you consider creating your special day, remember that it has to be “big” enough to warrant national attention – even though you’ll probably be using it to get the attention of your local media. So don’t tie it to your location or something that is peculiar to your area. Make sure that it plays in Pomona just as well as it plays in Poughkeepsie. For example, the small business owner of a local print shop might declare a “National Business Card Day.” It could be a day when business people are urged to give their cards to at least 10 people and review their cards to make sure everything is up to date. A local printer could also sponsor a contest that awards a prize to the professional with the best business card. This printer could also write an article that gives examples of great business cards and very poor business cards, or business cards through history. I can see it now: The lowly business card forever honored by its own special day! And if this were your idea, as you begin submitting it to the places listed above, you’d want to put out a press release and follow up with calls to your local media outlets, telling them that you’re trying to get a new “national day” on the calendar. That would certainly warrant some kind of mention, don’t you think? Build interest for your special day Get others in your industry and your community involved. As with any holiday, the more people who participate, the better. Hey, the greeting card people have based an entire industry on promoting special days – some of which weren’t all that special until the greeting card manufacturers got involved! You can do it too. You know that I’m all about inexpensive, yet powerful, DIY marketing schemes, and I think establishing your own special day is one of the best. Let me know what you come up...
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