Technology

For a number of years the price of technology to run our businesses has been dropping quite dramatically. Let me give you three general examples:

- Computer hardware — Computers far more powerful than the one with the Pentium I chip that cost me $2,500 a number of years ago, now sell for a little over $500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices of personal computer equipment have dropped 10% to 28% each year since 2000.

- Telecommunications — The prices of making phone calls are much cheaper, too. VOIP providers now offer unlimited calling plans within the U.S. and Canada for affordable flat monthly rates. Competition from non-traditional providers, including cable companies and eBay’s almost-free Skype service, has pressured the established telecom companies like AT&T to come out with bundled services to give the VOIP and cable companies a serious run for the money, especially in big metropolitan markets. Small businesses are beneficiaries of all this competition, in the form of lower prices.

- Software – Prices for business software also have come down in price, dropping 3% to 9% each year since 2000. And that doesn’t even tell the full story. You now can find free alternatives on the market in many business productivity categories, thanks to the open source movement. Software-as-a-service options also make powerful software available at hard-to-believe low monthly prices. And as competition heats up in some segments, some vendors such as Intuit are giving away introductory versions of their feature-rich proprietary software for free, to snag you as a loyal customer with the hope of some day in the future “upselling” you to a higher level package as your needs increase.

So what’s all this talk about inflation rearing its ugly little head? Read entire article.

Posted in Money Management, Technology

While I was plotting my next post about how to make your site more conversational, a reporter from Businessweek rang, asking for my thoughts on how smaller companies might leverage search, and in particular, what I thought about the practice of “reputation management.” He ended up running our conversation as an interview, which you can find here. Some tidbits:

For a small company, to what extent does your first page of Google results define your company or your brand?

It’s all relative to each business and the category they’re in, but I think it can be said that a significant amount of the encounters that any potential customer or current customer has with your brand has very little to do with you getting them to think about you, but rather them coming across you through one way or another via search.… Whatever the results are is what they’ll think of you, and whether or not that’s fair is kind of beside the point. It’s just true…

Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Technology

First it was blogs. In the world of small business, people started going nuts over blogs a couple of years ago.

Business owners and entrepreneurs and those who work in small businesses found the benefits of blogs enticing. Who could resist the allure? We entrepreneurs discovered that blogs gave us self-publishing that was almost as easy as creating a Word document; a do-it-yourself way to improve your search engine position; and a way to connect with customers and prospects more authentically in a marketing-saturated world. Read entire article.

Posted in Technology