I just created a new version of my business website, and it cost me nothing but time; and I don’t even have to pay a monthly fees. How did I do it? … Google. Heres a quick tour

1. The site itself (www.solutions4tech.com) is written  with Blogger. While blogger’s primary purpose is to blog (thus the name) its pretty flexible, and with some settings changes, it becomes a decent platform for a small  (less than 10 pages) website. You can tweak colors,layouts, and backgrounds. Even with your own domain the Blogger is still free.
2. My response form. I built this with the forms option in Google Docs. Each Submission writes to a spreadsheet that is also on Google Docs. There are a number of themes, so all I had to to was add the fields, and select a theme.  To publish it, I used the share option, chose to embed it, and pasted the html into my site.
3. The terms and conditions are hosted on Google Docs, its just a shared document. The reader even has the option of exporting to various formats like a PDF or Word  if she likes.
4. The Slide show is also also built with Google Docs. After I created it, I used the handy share option to embed it on my site just like the response form.
5. Behind the scenes, my email is through Google Apps Standard Edition. (Its free too!!)

Google isn’t the only company on the block that offers a suite of offerings for free that you can use to present and run your business. Check out Zoho, and Microsoft Office Live as well. The web is ripe with opportunities for you to put your best foot forward while spending  practically nothing. (You do have to pay for domain registration no matter who you use though.)

Now that I am an ‘Apple-head’ (big time iPhone user), I have discovered that the way I read emails have changed.

Since I only have a small screen, I read the screen full of information and then decide if the email is worth reading further. This means if you haven’t given me a reason to scroll down, I’m deleting your email. I’ve discovered that on a number of occasions, the important part of the email was out of view and I never read it. I suspect this may be true with others too.

So, in conclusion, make sure you either get to the point at the beginning of the email, or let the recipient know there’s more to read.

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

Email Organization for Greater Productivity

The following article was written by the president of my one of my marketing partners:AWebber Communications‡

Written by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

————-

AWebber Communications provides email follow up and newsletter delivery tools and services–Click here to find out more ‡

This is the third post in my series on Cloud Computing. Click here for the introduction and index.

Email is the obvious place to start with cloud apps because its both one of the oldest cloud based applications, and because its one of the most common. Almost every email provider has a web based email program, so its pretty easy to get your mail on the web. the problem with most of those web based applications is that they only allow you to read one email account at at time. Since I have personal email address, a business email address, a blog email address, and an email address that only my in-laws use, I don’t want to be going 4 different places each time I check my email.  PC based email programs like Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird let you pull and send from different accounts in the same program, I want to be able to do this on the web too.

I have started a few small business in my lifetime. Currently I am running a part-time home based business business that consists of this blog and a consulting business. Since this blog is about getting value from technology in a small business, I want to show you how I use technology to run my business better. 

Starting the business

Instead of paying a company to incorporate my LLC, I got on to the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, printed the forms and followed their directions to incorporate my LLC. This saved me about $100 in fees from a registration website. It may be worth your while to get to your states website and see if you can do this yourself. (I think you can only do this yourself if you register your corp. in the state you live in, but I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice.)

Internet and hosting

I use ATT DSL (So there’s no money saved there ). I registered my sites with GoDaddy.com‡ They usually have a good deals on website registration. While there are some free web hosting services, I also use GoDaddy‡ for my web hosting. They are very reputable, and since a good deal of my business comes from the web, it worth paying for hosting. GoDaddy has applications that you can install for free on its paid hosted sites, and I use a one of those, a blogging platform called WordPress  (So I didn’t pay for that at least). In any case I have  2 websites for less than  $120 per year  including annual registrations and monthly hosting fees. (Thats about $10/month !!!.)

Applications

I use both OpenOffice.org (a free MS office like office suite you install on your computer) and Google Docs for my Wordprocessing and Spreadsheet needs. Since both are free is saves hundreds ($250) compared to shelling out the big bucks for MS Office. For email I use Google mail (gmail). It allows me to consolodate my 5 email addressed (blog, consulting, 2 personal addresses, and one address that only my inlaws use) into a single location. Its easy to use and pretty robust for a web based email client

I do pay for my accounting software. I use Quicken Home And Business. But to save money I don’t upgrade it each year, I take about two and a half years between upgrades. I strongly belive that if it works, there’s no reason to upgrade (if you have to pay). I upgraded this last time becase they said that they were shuttng off my online bank access.

I think that, on average I have saved about $400 over the life of my business by making smart technolgy choices. 

I’m thinking of moving entirely to “the cloud” sometime soon so I’ll probably let you know how that goes.

Not more than a day after I posted my review of Jott, they sent me an email stating that they are out of Beta. They now offer three tiers of service– Jott Basic for Free, Jott for $3.95/month and Jott Pro for $12.95/month. Unfortunately they took away emailing, and Google calendar from the basic (free) service, but you still get 15 second notes with the free plan.  The Jott ($3.95/month) plan  is pretty much the same as the free Beta service I reviewed in my earlier post. I would have hoped they left some emailing on the free plan since I think that was Jott’s best selling point, but beggars can’t be choosers. If you need to do  emailing on the run, from a non-email enabled cell phone, the $3.95 a month plan may be worth it to you. I am still planning to use the notes feature myself since I forget stuff frequently, and its faster than writing.

I use Google mail (gmail) as my primary mail client, as well as for my personal emails. While I see many advantages to using gmail, its certainly not a slam dunk as a choice.

The Good: Its free (but most other email clients are too), It accessible from anywhere with an internet connection (like on vacation — is that good ??) Since your email is not stored locally on your PC, if your PC fails you still have your email. There is over 6 gigabytes  of email storage which is a lot. It integrates with Google maps so you can get a map to an address directly from an email. There are various clients for smart phones/PDA’s that allow you to check your  email separately from your main email and access your gmail address book (for email addresses only)-I use the Blackberry version. You can pull up to 5 other email accounts into your gmail client so you can consolidate your email

The Bad: Since it’s online, you need an internet connection to read your saved emails.  You don’t have the ability to create folders and sub-folders (It uses labels to organize, but its only one level).  Reading through emails tends to be a bit slower than with a PC based email client.

The Ugly:  Google reads all of your emails and generates all advertising based on  their content. Since the free service is free, Google can change the terms of service at will. Google will update the web client from time to time and you will need to get used to a new client.

Full Disclosure: I receive advertising revenue from Google, Inc, but I am not being paid or encouraged to promote this product.

Google is a trademark of Google, Inc. Blackberry is a trademark of Research In Motion, Inc.