Could your business benefit from a website or email marketing?

Then take the time to evaluate your personal or business use of the Internet and electronic marketing. Are you maximizing your use of websites, e-mail, e-commerce, and social media? Most of us could benefit from taking a step back, using our own websites (both business and personal marketing) and noting how they could be improved. Relax with a cup of hot tea, take notes, and once you’ve decided that it could improve, contact us at BTS to discuss how we can help.

The goal is to create a huge resource of popular and little known quotation for presentations, papers, sermons, personal inspiration, and enjoyment. Users can add new quotes and vote on others to increase the quotes rating.

It is perfect content for QuotedIt if you read it in a book or magazine, or heard it in a movie or song, or even if it was random chatter on the trolley or just something you thought up. From inspiration to vampires, our team has been adding quotes regularly and would like to see you join us!

Quote, Vote, Have Fun!

(don’t mind his capitalization and punctuation; he has his own ideas of how it should be done)

it really depends on what you want from the site.

for a business site, probably yes, you will want professional backed up hosting and a site designed by a reputable company and email at the domain (.com, .net, .org, etc) that you own.

if you just want a free personal website to have a few pages and put stuff on, you might check out freewebs.com, weebly.com or pages.google.com.

for a blog, no, you don’t need to pay anything to have a blog site. Take a look at wordpress.com or blogger.com, both are really good free blog sites that let you set up an account, do some customizations and have a free personal blog website. (note: blogger also lets you use a domain you own)

if you want a community type website, say for you and your friends or for you family to share info, you can do that real easy for free too. They will let you share pictures, music, messages, and more. You might look at facebook.com, multiply.com, bebo.com

Img: Billy Alexander

It sounds contrary at first glance, and I will explain, but dropping your important files may be the best way to save them. We all know that computers don’t live forever and no matter how technical or non-technical you are, you know something is bound to break sometime. With a little know-how you can recover from most failures. The one that becomes more tricky is the harddrive and that is why you just might want to drop your important files.

The harddrive is what stores information on your computer. They are built to last, but since they contain moving parts, they do eventually stop working. When it stops working, what happens to you important data? You might be able to pay large amounts to a specialized company to try and recover it, but most likely it’s just gone, unless you have a backup.

The concept of a backup is simple; keep a second copy of all you important data somewhere other than on your computer. But how? You could manually copy everything to another networked computer, or an external harddrive, or USB drive. You could use software that comes with your external harddrive to do an “automatic” backup, but when it compresses and manipulates your data into it’s own format that you cannot directly read, how will you know it really did what it claims to “automatically” do? Better yet, you could use some of the fantastic open source software that is available to automatically synchronize you data to the external drive, this leaves it readable and usable. That is a good solution, but you need to be a little bit tech savy for that. Just talking about it in this paragraph is ugly enough, much less actually reading the tech stuff to do it.

So what’s a regular non-tech to do? Now we’re getting to the punchline; drop the files! The online site GetDropbox.com offers up to 3 gigs of free online storage space. While 3g is not huge, it is most likely enough to backup your critical files. They have both a desktop program for your computer and an Internet interface so you can access your files from any computer connected to the Internet.

Their process is easy, even for non-technical users. Go to GetDropbox.com and click to download their software, install it and it will walk you through creating an account and setting everything up. It will create a folder called dropbox in your My Documents folder. Simply “drop” your important files into the dropbox folder and that’s it, the software will do the rest and keep a copy safely and securely stored on their remote computer. No worries for you.

They have a good tutorial and some documents to help explain what is going on. If you want to get a little more advanced you can use the public folder to share with everybody, create public photo galleries, or share with specific people to collaborate on work.

They have versions of their software for Windows, MAC, and Linux so everyone can take advantage of their service. All told GetDropbox is a wonderful experience and a great way to keep a safe copy of important files outside of your business or office. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s useful! For me that is a winning combination, so why not give it a try and drop some files.

Need one of the more robust backup solutions mentioned above?

Disclaimer: BTS is not affiliated with the following companies, receives no payment for discussing them, and may or may not utilize their services for our own business needs. We just think their kinda cool.

First is FreshBooks. This online service allows you to “send, track and collect payments.” There are two powerful features of this tool that we like. Automation of recurring bills. Never forget to send your clients monthly invoice, the system takes care of it for you. Second, payment through Paypal or other third-party services so you clients can pay electronically with credit cards so you get your money faster. Oh, and there is one more piece with integration, but we’ll cover that later.

Now, for the on-the-go piece, GroovySquared has built an iPhone app called MiniBooks to interact with FreshBooks while on the go. The FreshBooks team has a post about MiniBooks that includes more details, download link, and reviews.

It might also be noted that if you need accounting software, our friends at Clarity Accounting have integrated with FreshBooks to make it nice and easy to get your invoices and payments into their accounting software. And for the accounting novice, Clarity Accounting makes it very easy with a clean simple interface and a fantastic help section.

That’s it, two tools and now you are easily invoicing clients while on the go and tracking your time on jobs, all from the iPhone.

Our first step was to find a support phone number or email address, so we went to one of Microsoft’s primary websites and logged into our account. We then dug around until we found the support section and noticed they offer phone, email, and online chat support. Based on good online chat experiences with other companies such as HostGator, we thought, “Great, a quick chat and problem will be solved.” Boy were we wrong. Here’s how that chat session began.

You are number (6) in queue. Estimated wait time is 0 hours 39 minutes 50 seconds
You are number (5) in queue. Estimated wait time is 0 hours 40 minutes 45 seconds
You are number (4) in queue. Estimated wait time is 0 hours 43 minutes 48 seconds
You are number (3) in queue. Estimated wait time is 0 hours 51 minutes 9 seconds
You are number (2) in queue. Estimated wait time is 0 hours 39 minutes 19 seconds
You are next in queue… Estimated wait time is 0 hours 21 minutes 35 seconds
You are next in queue… Estimated wait time is 0 hours 24 minutes 42 seconds

Lessons:

• If you have a help or support team make it easy for clients to find them. Make it obvious on your website and other media how to contact them.
• Be honest but don’t depress us. Each time we moved up a position in the waiting line, our wait time got longer, even when we were next in line. The more a client waits the closer they should be to help, not further.

From the rest of the discussion (trimmed for brevity), which proved short and fruitless…

Yel: Hello Marc, I hope you didn’t have to wait a long time to get to us. Anyway, how are you doing today?

marc: …a specific website cannot be loaded/displayed.
marc: …Connecting through other ISPs works fine. Even multiple computers tried through msn dialup and none can reach this site. …other sites are working normally.

Yel: So this is the only website that is having problems and only when using the MSN connection.

marc: correct

Yel: I checked the website and it looks normal.

marc: yes it does

Yel: So this is even when using Internet Explorer, right?
Yel: As long as you use MSN dial-up?

marc: yes, tried 3 different browsers and none can get this site
marc: [explaination of what I think is going on]

Yel: That’s what I’m trying to find out.
Yel: The thing is, our tools have limited capabilities so I can’t promise you anything.

marc: [further explaination of how issue was narrowed to Microsoft]

Yel: I see. I’d have to be honest, we don’t have access to that part of our server so the only thing we can advise you for now is to wait it out. I’m sure it’ll be refreshed on our server. I’ll be filing a report about this to our Product Team so they can do something about it as soon as possible.

marc: it’s already been 7 days

Yel: I understand, that’s why I’m filing a report as well to hasten the update.
Yel: Would there be anything else that I can help you with?
Yel: I’ve submitted the report, by the way.
Yel: Hi, it looks like you’re busy with something else and I’ll need to end this session. I’ll go ahead and update your case number in case you need to contact us again. Thank you for contacting MSN Support.

Lessons:

• Again, be honest. If you know a client waited over an hour for something, thank them for waiting. Don’t pretend that the wait was not unduely long.
• It’s good to restate the issue for clarity, but only once. Don’t keep reiterating, reiterating, reiterating… we already know the problem.
• Never try to make your customer feels stupid by saying there is no problem, “I checked the website and it looks normal.” Obviously something is wrong or they would not have spent their time contacting you. Help them find the issue.
• The help should be worth the wait. If you can’t help, find someone who can. It doesn’t serve the client if “our tools have limited capabilities” or “we don’t have access.” Someone at the company does, that is why the client called you.
• Don’t add insult to injury. If a customer has already waited to get your help, it is not acceptable to tell them to “wait it out.” If you cannot help them, do not waste anymore of there time. At the very least offer to look into the issue further and get back to them.
• Never hang up on a customer. This seems obvious, but even in an online chat it is inappropriate to disconnect from a customer without offering them some form of resolution, even if it is to look further into the issue. Filing a report with no hope of ever being contacted again is probably not the best resolution.

How do you succeed and provided awesome customer service? Learn. From every  experience and interaction, learn something that can improve the way you interact with your customers and clients.  Record some of your interactions with clients as well as your interactions as a client, then analyze them similarly to how we have done here. Make notes and practice each item.

Analyze, learn, practice and you will provide outstanding customer service!

In the article, Help! I’m an Introvert!, the author discusses how he is a “situational extrovert” and how he used that knowledge to improve his networking. Personally, I say the following statements aloud each day to condition my mind to what I want.

Additionally, I have found that networking is easy for me when I am filling a particular role. For example, I was a greeter at my local church for some time. Within that role I could easily welcome each person with kind words, handshake, or pat on the back whether I knew them or not.  Outside of that role, I may have found it difficult to approach strangers and strike up a conversation. And for me this applies whatever I do, be it as Walmart greeter, telephone technical support, or project manager of a large group.

It could be said that I wear the hat well and fill the part. Give this a try next time you are around a group of new people or at a large event. Decide what you want from the event and create a role that will accomplish that. Now don the hat and network as if you had something to achieve, because you do.

Whether introvert or extrovert, networking is an important and vital part of your business. Don’t try to be something you are not, be real, open, and honest. Find ways to network that fit your strengths and talents and connect, with vendors, friends, customers, and potential customers. It’s vital to your personal and business growth.

Have a look at this article from entrepreneur.com where the author discusses:

• People-centric businesses know they can’t satisfy customers with freaked out workers
• People-centric businesses know managers are the most effective leaders in tough times
• People-centric businesses are ahead of the communication curve
• People-centric businesses don’t cut back on training in a crunch

Resources: http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/columnistpaulspiegelman/article203074.html

• Goal Achieving
• Wealth Building
• Success Principles

These are from an interview session with Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series.

You can find streamable and downloadable files at
http://darrenhardy.success.com/2009/07/free-bonus-success-audios/