Small Business Technology

We're honoured to be partnering with Diane McGee and WINGS & HEROS  to deliver a series of "Tech Talks".

http://www.piggybanktechnology.com/tech-talk.html

But first, I want to say THANKS to all of you who filled out our survey last week...the response was incredible and told us exactly what people were looking for training on...

Session 1: Business E-mail

I had the pleasure of doing a 1-hour keynote presentation for the East Gwillimbury Chamber of Commerce last Thursday night.

We covered "How to Build A Piggybank Website" and I was delighted at how enthusiastically received it was. There were many questions and a lot of excitement in the room as people jotted down notes about how they can improve their websites to deliver marketing

Strategic Planning isn't something reserved for just big companies. In fact, even Solopreneurs working from home need the benefits that come from holding regular strategic sessions.

Every month, Jennifer and I schedule at least one ½ day strategic planning session. This is a time when we leave our home office and go "off-site" (usually to a coffee shop!) and work ON our business.

Anyone who knows Mr. Bob knows that he's big on creating Raving Fans and they sure showed up at the Let's Get Connected event last night. By my count, there were well over 100 show up, including several friends/customers who travelled to listen to my "Gravity" speech.

Scott Giving his Gravity Speech

The turn-out for the day was quite good and I had a great response from the audience afterwards...In fact, I was surprised at the number of people who asked me for a copy of the PowerPoint presentation I put together. For those of you who want it, you can click here to download them.

Proud Dad with Daugher Kelly - Both had booths

 I was delighted to have my daugher Kelly (age 11) with her booth beside mine. She runs a Piggybank Website called "KidGiggles - Guilt free ways to keep grandkids busy".

Tomorrow evening, I'm showing entrepreneurs how they can move their business beyond the "doing, doing, doing" and take their business to the Next Level. I'm speaking on "Harness the Power of Gravity For Your Business" at the "Let's Get Connected" business tradeshow.

I encourage you to come check it out!

What: "Let's Get Connected" Business Tradeshow
When: Tomorrow (Thursday March 27) from 4:00 to

I remember back when having a fax number on a business card was the "cool thing" to have. Now, fax numbers are disappearing and in their place, everyone has to have an Email address.

In fact, Email has become the primary way business communications happen, displacing even the telephone. However, if you're using an Email address that's intended for personal use, instead of looking "cool", you look "amateurish".

The answer is to have a Business Email address such as yourname@yourcompany.com.

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I recently did an informal poll of business owners, asking them about their data back-ups. Sadly, most failed to have adequate protection in place and only one scored an A+.

What really alarmed me is that almost all of them knew of someone who had suffered because of a computer crash without adequate back-ups and still hadn’t taken measures to protect themselves.

Now There's No Excuse To Fall Victim To Data Disaster

With a small investment of time and money, you can be well on your way to having a robust back-up solution that covers you for the most common back-up/recovery scenarios:

1. Deleted a file that you need to recover
2. Hard drive crashed
3. Building destroyed

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There can be some nasty business hiding beneath offers of "free domain name included" or "comes with a free domain name". In fact, I've had a few clients (and some very high profile ones) lose their domain name and have to start over with a brand new web address.

Your domain name (your web address, e.g. www.piggybanktechnology.com) is an important business asset. Imagine what would happen if you lost control of that web address and someone else legally put up a site with less than desireable content? That would cause significant harm to your business. Not to mention the lost business from visitors trying to go to a lost domain.

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To find a need to fill is the single most important decision you’ll make in your entire business, and that decision will impact everything you do in your business.

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Many companies use tradeshows to generate customer and distributor leads. However, more than 95% of companies exhibiting are missing a huge opportunity to supercharge their leads.

Tradeshows can be expensive. By the time you add up the costs for the booth space, the booth display itself, transportation, having employees out of commission during the show, food and so on, it can be thousands of dollars to display at a tradeshow.

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