Category: Tips

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Free Phone Conferencing When You Need It

I need a phone conferencing resource for a client project that I am just getting ready to start up on, but I don’t want to pay a lot of money and I am not sure how often I will use the service. I found one that suited my needs to a T and it may be a benefit to you as well.

First, I didn’t really need a toll free line, although with the service I selected you can pay $.07 a minute for calls from all participants and get a toll free number if you want. For me, with nearly everyone having unlimited national calls on their phones or low cost long distance, having a toll free number for all participants was not a really big need.

What I did need was a way to not have the issues of trying to use three way calling from my Verizon phone service; which is too hard to set up. I wanted a call in number and a participant ID for callers.

This is what I found from research on the Web:

1. I liked this service for $.10 a minute toll free conference calls www.ConferenceCall.com.

2. I liked this service for my free toll conference calls www.InstantConference.com. In fact, this is the one I chose to start out with due to the ease of use.

I have tested www.InstantConference.com already and the calls are very clear. The information on how to use the service is really easy and they even send a log of the call times via email.

So, if you are like me and you hate free three way calling as it seems someone is always dropped from a call or it is hard to set up to get everyone on together, you may want to consider this free conference call service.

P.S. I am not being paid to write this post for either of these two companies. I found them and researched them on my own and just wanted to share their services with you as you may benefit from them as well.

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Is Your Website Spewing Malware?

When it comes to your website you don’t want to be going “viral” by spewing malware. In the last month, I have helped two website owners whose blogs and websites were infected and had been banned by Google get back in business. It can happen to the best business really.

In fact, in the last two months two of the problems have been clients who have been hosted on Network Solutions. That’s a big firm and you would think that your website would be safe there, but in one case we found that the infection and re-infection was not coming from the outside but rather from Network Solutions internally. It appears that their systems had been compromised and the source of intrusions were coming from their own servers. That’s really a terrible situation and devastating to their own web hosting business.

One of the other sites was hosted at a small webmaster either in a privately branded enterprise or on a server in his own office. We’ve also seen sites on GoDaddy be compromised as well recently.

So what’s the best solution? I tell my clients that really any host could have this problem, but you have a better chance of being malware and hack-attack free when you use a mainstream host. Personally, I like Hostway. My own website has been hosted at Hostway since 2001 and many of my own clients. I have not had a single incident on my own site or on my Hostway hosted client sites. Yes, you will pay for improved security when you work with a quality mainstream webhost, but ask any of the victims I have worked with recently and they would have paid it willingly if they could have only known what problems being infected would cause as well as the expense to repair the damage.

In some cases Google will tag a site in the search index if it spiders malware spewing code on a website page. There is nothing more devastating than seeing your site with a warning on Google. You literally will be shut down and may even take a “black eye” with customers when this happens to you.

One of the best ways you can make sure you aren’t spewing malware is to list your site in the Google Webmaster control panel and keep an eye on your own organic search placement. In the cases I have worked on, two had the warning notice on Google.com and only one had a notice in the webmaster control panel. But there were other signs such as funny keywords appearing as queries in your Google Webmaster results, and funny code appearing as your meta description in search results.

You’ve just got to keep an eye on your own web presence and use any tools you can to make sure you don’t become the next victim for the criminals that want to use your site to spew their malware. Be vigilant to be safe!

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What Can You Automate to Drop Your Overhead?

If you are a small business owner like me, you need to keep your prices low to garner business and yet keep your overhead low to make more profit. So, what can you automate or farm out to others in order to have the time to do what you do best – sell your services?

For me, it was automating much of my accounting as this was a huge time drain for me. By purchasing accounting software I made billing customers faster and more accurate.

My next step was to automate my credit card billing process. By integrating my credit card billing into my accounting software I cut multiple steps of having to manually log payments.

I then looked very carefully at the simple, no thought process, tasks that I perform daily that seem to take up time and I have trained an assistant to do them affordably. Sometimes paying a flat rate to do a task can work, especially when it is with your own children. For me, I have my kids check off that my writers have turned in their blogs and done their tweets. That way I can focus only on the problems or late items that need my personal action. My kids make summer time money and I get more time to sell jobs.

I also decided that I needed to train a helper. Not everyone needs this, but if you can find someone competent you can train a person to do some of the repetitive tasks you do daily or weekly. For me, I use a helper to add blogs that customers write themselves to their blog control panel and add links that I have selected and written up in advance to social bookmarking services. I don’t let me helper do things that really require sophisticated knowledge or decisions that the client is really paying ME for, but for the mundane tasks that are a part of certain service offerings I try to use my helper.

By really reviewing what you can move off your daily queue, you can allow yourself more time to follow-up with leads, have more time to really talk to and service existing clients and prospects, and time to have a vision for your own business.

When you are so inundated with daily tasks you have no brain power left to create new services, position your own business where it needs to be on the Web, or to look for new ways to serve your existing clientèle. So, what can you automate to get back to what you love, which is why you started your own business in the first place? Let me know what you have automated by leaving a comment below.

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Customers Really Do Want to Pay You On Time, Just Give Them Some Help

If you have been in business as long as I have (since 2001), you’ve had customers who are slow payers and no payers. But, in reality most customers do really want to pay you on time, some just need a little help being more timely than others.

I have found as my business has grown that my tolerance for slow payers has rapidly diminished. Slow payers directly affect my own pay check, as a small business owner. So, what do you do to help slow payers be on-time payers? For me, I changed several of my billing procedures. This is what I have done:

  1. Added online credit card payments both with Sage Payments (integrated with my accounting software) and PayPal.
  2. Instituted a policy that self credit card payers had to pay for services earlier than automatic credit card payers (where we process the card for them).
  3. Added in our contract we don’t provide services until we have payment in advance.
  4. Really policed my payment dates. Stopped services if we did not get payment in our contracted due dates.
  5. Sent gentle reminders before the payment deadline to all self paying clients.
  6. Gave more payment options.

In fact on number 6, I am getting ready to do just that with Pay Pal’s new enhanced recurring payment options. You can read more about this service we are now enacting in this link in the previous sentence. This new program allows you to give your client’s more flexibility in how they can pay. You can schedule monthly payments at different amounts, create monthly repeating subscription-type payments, and even installment payments. You and the client can also decide a monthly spend up to amount so you can bill automatically variable amounts each month.

For me, getting customers to pay on time is still about giving them options. However, chasing around your payments does take time and adds to your overhead. For my business, I am also instituting a new program – if you don’t pay on time two months in a row, you will now have to choose one of Pay Pal’s enhanced recurring payment programs or we will simply consider that we are not a good business match for you.

Slow payers and no- payers can really affect your bottom line and create an atmosphere where you are forced to raise your fees to all customers, as your overhead increases to cover the time you spend to collect payments from slow payers. So, help customers to help themselves (by keeping your own prices low) by offering more payment options.

P.S. PayPal did not pay me to write this post, I am signed up and will be using their new payment program and thought it was excellent for my own business use and wanted to share the details with you as well.