Business Category Archive

Utilising technology to its full business potential

9 Replies Chadrack

There is no doubt about it. Technology has greatly enhanced how we carry out our businesses today. It’s just one of the beauties of the information age and for this, most of us cannot but thank modern communication technology for the opportunity to work and connect with the whole wide world!

But, think about this…

Is technology really a blessing to your business or you have become so obsessed with it that it has become a curse?

Have you become so engrossed and mesmerized by the tools of information technology that you have quickly forgotten why you bought them in the first place?

Have you forgotten that those tools were to leverage your time and help grow your business?

It’s really unfortunate that many online business entrepreneurs unintentionally have allowed modern technology gadgets and tools to suck the time out of their lives and add needless overhead to their businesses.

As a fellow web entrepreneur interested in your business success, I want to use this article to give you some basic tips on how you can truly make modern day technology a blessing in your online business. My desire is to ensure that you make every cent you will ever spend on your business count. Of course, this may not agree with many but that doesn’t really matter as long as you are able to gain with it. And so, I invite you to read this article all through.

A Japanese and a Texan story

The Story of the Japanese and the Texan

I don’t know if you have heard this story before, but I must say it is one that has a lot of lessons for us as regards what we want to discuss in this article. The story is about a Japanese man and a Texan who were passing through customs at an airport. The Japanese man was said to have with him two large suitcases and the Texan wanting to play the Good Samaritan, offered to help the Japanese move the suitcases toward the customs officers. Just as he was doing this, the Japanese man’s wristwatch started beeping and the man listened to the message and talked through a miniature speaker on the telephone in the wristwatch.

The Texan was amazed and right there offered to purchase the watch for $5,000. But the Japanese declined, saying the watch was not for sale.

The Texan now more interested in the Japanese man continued helping the man to push his heavy bags forward. A few seconds later the watch beeped again and this time the Japanese man opened the watch to receive an email message and then replied same using a small computer contained in the watch. The Texan, awestruck, again offered to purchase the watch but this time for $25,000.

“The watch is not for sale,” the Japanese man again replied.

Now, the Texan could not take the thought of the watch from his mind. To him that wristwatch is just want he wanted right now! And, then as he again helped push the enormous bags forward the watch beeped a third time. This time a long fax came out. The Texan, now more determined to own that watch, offered to purchase it for $300,000.

At this, the Japanese man turned to him and asked if he had the money there. The Texan quickly and eagerly wrote out a check for him. The Japanese man processed the check on the watch and then transferred the money into his Swiss bank account. After this, he took off the watch and handed it to the Texan and walked away.

As he was walking away the Texan realized that the Japanese man had left the enormous bags behind. Turning around he called out to him, “you’re forgetting your bags.”

“Those are not my bags,” the Japanese man shouted back. “They’re the batteries for your watch!”

Lol!

Alright, so how does this story relate to what I want to discuss with you here?

In many ways! Actually the moral of the story is that the Texan got caught on the wrong side of information technology! And so, my point here is that you should be careful that you don’t fall into the same trap.

To help you avoid this trap here a few tips on how you can make technology to work maximally for your online business.

building a successful online business

1. Don’t Invest Your Time Or Money Except If It Adds Value

Every day new and enticing tools and software are being pushed into the market. You must beware that you’re not drawn by them. If you allow yourself to be obsessed or mesmerized, you will end up with gadgets that are nothing but fanciful toys.

Before investing your resources in any tool of technology, ask yourself if it will increase sales, help lower overhead or help in your business effectiveness. If any gadget fails in any of these areas then do not invest your time or money in it.

2. Do Not Become A Slave Of Technology

Many online entrepreneurs have allowed themselves to become slaves of online tools. I’m sure you are very much aware of the distractions we all face every day on the net. Online media, online games, online chatting etc, have become an obsession for many.

As an entrepreneur, you must understand that your time is valuable. You must therefore learn to master these tools so that they do not sabotage your productivity. If possible find ways of automating the use of these tools.

3. Use Inexpensive But Smart Tools Whenever Possible

Why rush to get any technological tool or gadget that hit the market? Do not be deceived, that tool may be the latest right now but with the rate these tools are being turned out, that latest gadget may just be obsolete even before you learn to enjoy its full potentials.

The solution? Decide on what you want done in your business and then go for the tools that will help you with that. The good thing is that there are smart tools that you can pick up online that will help you save both money and time and possibly increase your effectiveness.

4. If You Must Buy It Then Use It To The Fullest

This flows from #3 above. One thing that is clear is that most technological gadgets today can actually perform a whole lot of things. If you must invest your money and time on any of these, then learn to use it to the fullest. There are a hundred and one places online where you can learn about using these tools. There are free tutorials you can access online. Also blogs like the Technology Bloggers, can be of great help.

5. Don’t Get It Before You Need It

As an internet marketer I think I’m progressing in error here but I think your success as an entrepreneur is more important to me than any form of monetary gain.

If you’re subscribed to internet marketing newsletters or you spend a considerable time surfing the net, you will understand that every day new tools and “push button” software are being pushed at us left, right and center by smart internet marketers.

If you’re not focused, you’ll be tempted to believe that if you don’t own that latest tool or software, the world will just be passing you by!

But instead of falling into this trap, ask yourself if you indeed need that tool right now. If not don’t go for it. When you truly do need it, the right tool, and maybe something better, will be available for you!

Conclusion

In a rapidly changing world, technology is essential to effectively compete as a business however, not every tool of technology is worth your time. Spending your time and finance on technology for its sake, will end up as a curse instead of a blessing. Be disciplined and master your use of online tools and gadgets if you want your business to greatly benefit with the latest push button technology.

Over to You: Have you ever invested in a tool or gadget that you later regretted? Are you an online entrepreneur? How are you maximizing your use of technology for your online business? Share your experience with us in the comments below.

Ideas on how to promote a startup on a budget

5 Replies Nishadha

Successful startups have some things in common and top notch marketing is one of them. You might have come up with the greatest idea in the world or built the coolest application, but if other people don’t know about it, your idea or product isn’t worth much. Many young entrepreneurs get so sucked into the creation of the product, that they treat marketing as an afterthought. But as I said before, if users don’t know about a product they won’t be using it.

The immense popularity of the internet has leveled the playing fields, so someone with a small budget working from a garage can compete with big companies as long as they have a cool idea. In fact they might have a better chance in some niches because people have started to distrust companies. Below are few ways you can promote your startup – specifically tech startups.

Social Media

The starting point is creating a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Both are free to start and you have the potential to tap into millions of users. You can get the ball rolling by asking your friends to like and share the page.Business Networking in the 21st Century

Social networks are a good place to share your ideas and plans and get some feedback on them. Every little things count to successfully promote your product. If you have a product that is catering to a specific niche, then try joining a similar niche social network as well.

Contacting Leading Blogs and Getting Press Coverage

Once you come up with a working solution you can contact leading industry blogs to cover your product. Most major technology blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable have separate application forms for startups, so if you are confident about your product you can submit to them.

EDITOR NOTE: I must have misread, I couldn’t see Technology Bloggers among those ‘major technology blogs’! 😉 One day… – note by Christopher

Not only will you get massive exposure you will be able to get funding as well. Even if you don’t get published in major publications there are many other websites that promote startups and you can find many of them by doing a simple Google search.

Attending Conferences

Attending conferences and your local tech gatherings is another great way to spread the word about your product. Attending major conferences helps you network with people and pitch your product to industry leaders.

Local gathering are important because in most of these you will be able to present your product to an audience using a projector, which is far more effective than reading an article about your product. You will also get instant feedback on how you can improve your product as well.

Search Engine Optimization

Another promotion stream that is ignored by most startups is search engine optimization. Although most people in the technology field know about SEO, few actually try to leverage its power. This is especially useful if you are a global product catering to a non tech crowd. They won’t be reading Mashable and attending tech conferences, so the most probable way they will find your product is via search engines.

Even if you are catering to a tech crowd search engine optimization is a must. The long term benefits of SEO are immense. Although it is advisable to outsource your SEO work, if you have lots of content produced through your blog and website, it is better to hire your own SEO engineer. Be careful though, as black-hat SEO can be very damaging to a site, so if you do outsource, make sure it is to someone trustworthy.

Mentioned above are some major things you can do to promote your tech startup. Always remember that more people know about your product the better. The bigger your customer base, the likelihood is, the more money you will make/people you will help!

Back to the Basics: De-cluttering your Computer

9 Replies Paul Morris

If you own a PC or if you are using one at work then you just earned for yourself an extra responsibility of organizing your files and even your folders. This is one task that could sound really easy when the PC is still new until you start accumulating hundreds of different files and see the bad effects of cluttering your computer with both important and useless files. Of course the most apparent effect of file chaos can be seen on the PC’s speed as it tends to become slow as the day goes by and then errors start to appear, and then the PC crashes ultimately. Again, it all began in ignoring a rather simple task – organizing your files.

Saving files, regardless of its size, can influence PC clog up. But this is one convenience of owning a PC; you can create files such as photos, documents, movies, music, and more, store them and retrieve them later when necessary. This is just the way it’s supposed to be, right? We cannot not save files in our PCs, most of the times it is a necessity. Thus, the best way to attack this challenge is to intelligently organize files and folders. When I said intelligently, I meant not just simply arranging files in a specific way, it means de-cluttering both your PC and your life.

The truth is, file organization is not really a complicated task; it’s just as straightforward as organizing paper files. It all comes down to storing files in folders by categories and sequences that make sense.

A Laptop Full of FilesBefore organizing your files though, make a habit of classifying files as important or useless at the earliest phase possible: before saving files. If you can, avoid saving redundant and unnecessary files, then please do. It doesn’t take much time to evaluate a file’s importance to see if you should save it or not. While you master this habit, try another one: design and follow a consistent way of naming your files and folders. For instance, if you are using a PC at work wherein you need to store files related to customers, dealers and even colleagues, you may want to create sub-folders for each group and then store all files and folders related to each group under them. You can make organization more fun and effective by applying related icons to each sub-folder for easy identification.

It may be wiser to group related files together whatever its type. It doesn’t help to create specific folder for Word files, a folder for Excel files, a folder for PowerPoint files and so on. In Windows Explorer, you can set it to arrange files in a folder alphabetically and by type so it is easier to identify each file type. Besides, each file type is represented by distinguishing icons so it won’t be hard to identify a file by its type. It is smart to group files by project though if this makes sense to you or by month if date is an essence.

Another way to organize files is to separate current files to the completed ones. You may want to create a folder named “On-going” for current files and “Completed” for the finished files. Once you are done with a current file, you can just transfer it to the completed folder. Again, you can use this method only of it makes sense to you and your nature of work.

Also, it would be wiser to break a large number of files into separate sub-folders. This would make navigating into a folder easier. You can create sequential subfolders for invoices for instance. Thus, if you have an “Invoices” subfolder, you may want to create subfolders “Invoice_Jan”, “Invoices_Feb”, “Invoices_Mar” and so on within it. The notion is to store files in a group of logical folders instead of having one big folder. It makes sense then not to create subfolders for a lesser number of files. It would only take time to click on different folders if you only store at most 5 files in each folder.

Now, this will be an entirely different story if you already cluttered your PC with files (probably most are unimportant). You may have to spend time cleaning up your PC by deleting unnecessary files first and then reorganize your important files into separate folders. In organizing files, an optimization tool can certainly help. Optimization tools can automatically delete unimportant files and even temporary files that may have been affecting your PC’s speed and performance.

File organization is one task you should not avoid, no matter how trivial or boring you may think it is. This is definitely a prevention task rather than a cure as it could prevent future problems in time management as well as in your PC’s performance. If you want to make your work and your life less complicated, get better in organizing your files. It’s easy when you know how!