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Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

July 31st, 2011

10 Free or Cheap Things You Can Do To Market Locally

What your local small business needs, free or cheap, to improve your marketing and sales considerably (20 min. video):

Ed Dale’s program is now The Challenge.

This video is about 2 years old, so a few things have changed. I’ve mentioned the changes below as I listed the resources.

Help

  • A surly web-savvy teenager
  • Lots of soft drinks teenager likes
  • Lots of snacks teenager likes
  • Some money ($20 or so) to flip teenager at the end of his/her work for you

Free Resources

Cheap Resources

Here are some extra things I find very useful:

A really good reason to use AWeber is it is easily integrated with Facebook pages. If you just want your web presence to be on Facebook, you’ll need an email service that works with it.

A blog or website has become optional because of Facebook pages. You can connect with your market using your Facebook page as your website on Google Local, and a Facebook page is very easy to update.

Six of these services require a Google account. If you have a Gmail, YouTube, or Blogger account, etc., you have a Google account, and you can use it on all Google’s services. You can create separate accounts if you want to, but you don’t have to.

Fixed costs in this list AWeber and HostGator. AWeber costs $19.95 per month, and the first month is typically deeply discounted. HostGator costs $9.95/month.

If you choose private web hosting for you website or blog, it shouldn’t cost more than about $10/month, and it costs about $10/year to own your web address (URL). But paying for your blog is optional.

The variable costs on this list are the pay-per-click advertising you may choose to do. Remember, you can do intermittent advertising, weekend-only advertising, or a few days a month. You are not stuck with a long-term advertising contract and bill.

Again, why do you need these tools?

  • iPhone
  • Blackberry
  • iPad
  • Android
  • Tablet PC
  • Smartphone

If you find you need help with setting these services up, seriously, find a web-savvy teenager.

Don’t want to do it yourself? I’ll do it for you for $40 (if you don’t have a surly teenager available:).


A lot of these techniques can be implemented even if your business does not have a website.

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July 22nd, 2011

Why you need a web presence

Everybody knows our economy is in the toilet, and it may get worse before it gets better. This has been going on since 2008, so a plan B is essential to padding your landing, no matter how far you end up falling. Depending on a single income stream is no longer a wise choice.

You need every avenue you can find to put your business further out there so people can find you over your competition.

Whether you have a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, you must be on the web. Why? I have 6 words for you:

  • iPhone
  • Blackberry
  • iPad
  • Android
  • Tablet PC
  • Smartphone

You need the ability to reach the people you market and sell to who want to buy what you offer. You have the ability to do that online while they’re out looking for what you’re selling. If you’re not mobile-accessible, you’re invisible.

Get listed free in Google Local. If you are listed, anyone with a portable web-connected device can search for you and get your name, phone number, address and a map to your location. They can also link to your website or facebook fan page. You do not necessarily even need a website or blog. In many cases you can use your facebook page as your website.

The phone book is beginning to go the way of the buggy whip. In 5-10 years, I doubt there will be telephone books anymore. The size of the phone book we got this year was about half the size of last year’s phone book.

You may want to keep your Yellow Pages ad if you know you get customers from it, but you may be able to reduce it’s size, or simply list your business name and number, and save some money. If you always ask your customers how they found you (and you should and write it down), you’ll know whether you should continue using old-school forms of advertising, and whether you can downsize it.

There are 10 things you can do pretty fast to get a web presence, and 7-8 of them are free. You can reduce your marketing costs substantially, depending on how many online techniques you want to implement. The cost of the 2-3 paid services is dirt cheap compared to the monthly fees the phone company, magazines, and local newspaper charge you.

I’ll post a 20 minute video in the next post walking your through each free or cheap technique step-by-step to get your business noticed. You may even want to have your own mobile app developed.

In another future post, I’ll write about blogging. There will be free videos and a pdf report. You can blog for free or get private hosting. I graduated from Blog Mastermind and it helped me immensely to improve my blogs.

If you want a blog (website) set up for you, please let me know (email me or leave a comment on this post). I charge very reasonable prices to help you set up and get started fast.

I hope these resources will help your business reduce costs and be more successful. Please leave any thoughts or questions you have in the comments.

To your business success,

Sherri

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August 17th, 2009

Top 500 Passwords to Avoid

I just read a great article from my PC Pitstop Newsletter, and the article had a link to this site that lists the top 500 passwords to avoid:

Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time

I can think of several others that should also be avoided:

  • Video game system and character names
  • Common movie and TV show character names
  • Common book character names
  • Product brand names (Dell, Sony, JVC, Acer, Nokia, Apple, Whirlpool, etc.)
  • Unaltered TV show, book or movie titles
  • Unaltered full names of actors and other celebrities

Also, here is the link to the PC Pitstop blog article:

10 Rules to Protect Your Passwords

I can’t say I agree with everything in it, but using a combination of some of the suggestions gives you at least medium strength passwords.

The best passwords are generated randomly by computer using small and capital letters, numbers and symbols; and a minimum of 8 characters. 11-16 characters is better. But, you must be able to remember them. Therein lies the password dilemma.

Some PDA’s have programs that can randomly generate passwords for you, and then you can delete them within the encrypted part of the software. They can’t be hacked unless you have a way of hacking 256 bit or higher encryption and then recovering deleted data from it. One rule for using these programs is don’t connect your PDA to the internet. Key logging software could capture this information as well.

I disagree that passwords shouldn’t be written down on paper and locked in a safe when at home and access is limited. When one dies, someone needs to be able to get into the person’s computer and it makes it a lot easier on your executor to provide the information in some form. The safest place to lock a written list of passwords would be a bank safe deposit box.

Another reason to have some record of passwords other than in your head is what if you have brain surgery or a mild stroke? The brain part that remembers the passwords could be erased and you’re up a creek without a paddle at that point.

It’s a tradeoff. Password strength and security v the human fault to forget things. My advice? Make the best tradeoff you can.

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