I usually talk about – or rant more like – about why business needs to be online to save money, time and often their business, especially during economic downturns like these. But what about your everyday consumer?
Martha Lane Fox, best known as the co-founder of LastMinute.com, did a study with PWC and came up with some brutal numbers on how the everyday household can save hundreds of pounds and earn thousand more per year. Rather than me repeating it all here find out more on the BBCs Website. She has done an excellent job with this – you can’t afford not to see this.
And if you are still in a ‘business’ frame of mind, ask yourself these questions:
- How much money does my business lose because I don’t use enough online technology?
- How much can my customers save when they come to my website?
- How much better would my business do considering the savings in money and time, and increased turnover by using online technology?
Find out more @ bbc.co.uk
I just received another email from technorati in which they told me that my loyal readers and blogroll entries no longer have any meaning to my blogs technorati ranking.
If you write for an audience like mine, where over 70% of my core readers don’t even have a website, it is very difficult to get anywhere with technorati. Does that make my readers or my blog less relevant. According to technorati it does – well, I beg to differ on this.
I am certain, that not only my blog falls outside of this very narrow band of technology insiders and geeks, which in my opinion makes technorati a useless tool to a large proportion of internet users and bloggers.
On another node, they can’t even pick up blog mentions on none registered blogs, this makes technorati a completely useless and distorting barometer of the blog-sphere.
Still, they want me to spread the “technorati” word for them, while they become more and more useless to me, so I’m sorry, but I have to decline this request for help.
Google ranks by popularity of the post in it’s niche. That appears to be a much more evenhanded approach, even twitter seems more appropriate.
So I guess my opinion is that technorati is no longer relevant! – ST.
While WinWeb itself is the biggest victim of the ‘winweb security’ malware, it has responded to over 10,000 partly angry and abusive enquiries and sent out information on how to uninstall the malware each time.
Google ‘winweb’ and you can see why WinWeb.com is still victimized for the criminal and illegal use of it’s trademark. Even months after the virus has passed and any good anti-virus software can handle this virus, the first page of the google search is putting winweb.com in damagingly bad company by name association.
WinWeb learned first hand that if you want to hurt your competition, you just spread a virus with your competitors name on it. I am not saying this is what happened here, I have no proof of that, it is still true that the mere name association is extremely damaging. I also do not encourage you to try doing this as it is a criminal offence.
Never the less WinWeb is still helping one or two individuals per week and should you have an issue with the virus, please go to WinWeb’s Website and press the ‘SUPPORT’ button on the left side of your browser window, mention the Winweb Security virus and WinWeb will help you to get rid of the menace.
This however is one reason why SaaS software is often more secure than running software on PCs. Unfortunately Microsoft with it’s windows operating system has been infected by many thousands of viruses over the years, and there is no end in sight. Other operating systems like Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux have done a much better job to keep their customers safe and sound – maybe something to think about, the next time you’re looking for a new computer.
How safe is your computer? Have you checked lately? –ST
Anita Campbell over at the Small Business Trends, the Über-Blogger when it comes to SME blogging, has just released a list called ‘The Ultimate Small Business Twitter List‘. If you are interested in small business and home business issues this list will give you a lot to read about.
I – @stefantopfer, have been honored by being included alongside people like Guy Kawasaki – @guykawasaki, Brian Clark – @copyblogger and many others. Some of my friends are on the list too, like Shama Hyder – @shamahyder and John Jantsch – @ducttape. There are many new twitter bloggers for me to follow, so I have a lot of following to do.
Let us not forget to follow Anita – @smallbiztrends and to thank Anita for her outstanding work to compile this list. A little birdie is tweeting that WinWeb – @winweb will be kicking off, …. or should I say tweeting off soon, follow WinWeb on Twitter now so you don’t miss a beat, sorry tweet.
Happy tweeting and following – it is a great business & marketing tool. — ST.
Using social networking sites for small business is as essential as being able to write an invoice in todays largely online based economy. It will help you to extent your business network and provide for two important business functions all at the same time:
- Outsourcing – by networking you will get to know peoples skills, see their previous work, work with them on a per project basis and with that timeshare professionals;
- Sales & Marketing – by networking you will find new clients, offer advice, become a trusted business partner and make money.
You always need to take care when doing business online, but you can get references from others, see their work and work out a payment plan, based on completion stages of the project.
Here are the social networking tools I use the most:
- LinkedIn – it’s a business social network with over 30 million users.
- twitter – is about micro-blogging and has over 2.5 million users.
I also use facebook, but have not made much off it so far. I only have limited time, so I focus on the best social networks for me.
Why not sign up today and join me and millions of others in the new and fast developing social networking business environment. –ST.
UPDATE 2008-12-10: If you want some proof have a look at this on enterprisenation.com – a social network.
I think I have, you can follow my madness. Like our OnlineOffice, twitter is an online tool, so you do not need to install anything, if you don’t want too. I love this little tool, it is great for small business. At first glance you may not realize it, but it’s brilliant. The best way to understand it, is to sign up and watch others, you’ll get the idea soon enough. Again – think global, do local, more about that in a later post.
In this post I would like to share some of the twitter applications I like to use:
- TweedDeck is my favourite, since you can have different columns for different groups, replies and direct messages, very handy. IT’s free, but make a donation if you can.
- Adjix -> Twitter, is a bookmark-let that sits in your browser bookmark bar and let’s you tweet about anything you see on the web in seconds – great tool – free too.
- BrightKit, I’m just getting starting with this one, but it let’s you have more than one account and allows you to plan you tweets releases by time. Great for blogging.
- Tweetie for my iPhone, it is easy to use and handy on the go.
BTW, make sure you don’t use all of them at the same time, as twitter will only allow you 100 updates per hour for all your APIs, so you could run out before the hour is up. This does not apply for the twitter web interface.
Yes, I have gone tweet mad, but I like it. You should give it a go. tweet, tweet…. tweet!– ST.
Here is my weekly selection of favourite small business blog posts, I hope you enjoy some of them:
- Guy is talking about my favourite subject – bootstrapping. I don’t agree with all of it for my readers, but if you are in the business to grow fast and large this could be for you.
- Shama discovered odiogo and has changed the name of her website – Click To Client. Different name, but still the same great content.
- eMoms have 23 Tips to Take your Business To the Next Level – Step 1….. – great post.
- A timely piece from The Digerati Life on ‘Money Tips To Cope With Hard Times!’
- Doing Business in a Recession is not easy, but John helps you to focus on the important stuff.
- Jeff Cornwall believes the glass is still half full, I agree with him.
- John Jantsch is certainly right when he says, ‘ Marketing Is Everyone’s Job’.
- Laura Spencer forgot to mention WinWeb’s OnlineOffice, but the rest is spot on in her piece about, ‘How to start a freelance business today‘.
- Emma just has a great site for any home business, I love her stuff.
That is it for today, I’m off to our Christmas party soon, I guess there will be no blogging tomorrow. 
WinWeb posted this earlier on our WinWeb Blog and I thought my readers here would benefit from it too, so here it is:
‘Cloud Computing‘ is in the media everywhere these days. What does is mean and how is it going to help your small business or home business?
WinWeb has been providing Cloud Computing for over ten years now and the benefits are as multifaceted as the technology itself. Here are the basic benefits how we at WinWeb see them:
There are many other names for this kind of online and on-demand technology, such as Software as a Service also known as SaaS technology, or Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, we still call our applications ‘Web Applications’. Then there is still an ASP – Application Service Provider model, were suppliers host normal desktop applications on their servers, because they do not have the online technology needed to create real web applications, this is usually a very expensive way of doing things.
If you don’t get all these benefits, why change your software? Moving business processes forward should not end by putting the same old software online, it should help you to run your small home business better, while at the same time providing easy to use solutions, leaving you free to follow your entrepreneurial vision – then and only then is it really ‘Cloud Computing’.
Read more ….
Blogs are a great source of information, especially for small business & home businesses. So many bloggers share their vast knowledge and experience with us all online and for free. Many of these blogs have become an invaluable source of information and insight. Lately however, I noticed a trend that makes it almost impossible to use some of my favourite blogs because of the amount of advertising and the way the advertising is intermingled with the real blog content.
Darling Brown: " That'll be £30,000.00 Please – Each!"
Here is the staggering truths, how our Darling-Brown dream team – nightmare team – paid out $2.4 trillion of our tax-money on the UK bail-out, or should I say the UK bank bail out.
We all remember the Darling Brown spin:
… and so on. Well here are the facts:
These numbers show that the UK is the worst affected country world-wide by a almost 4:1 margin.
How some of the money was spend:
TOTAL of over £1.5 trillion directly into banks – unbelievable, staggering – who has been made responsible for this mess?
The government has “borrowed” this money. National debt:
More than half of the spending on the NHS will be just interest payments to cover the national debt and equal to the education budget.
Between 2007 and 2008 our loss in personal wealth has been £31,000 per household. The effects of “quantitive easing” and the unprecedented loss in the value of the £, will increase the pressure on our personal wealth even further.
The effect on all of us, not only Jeremy Clarkson, will be felt for decades to come, our pensions, house prices, the ability to buy foreign goods, travel & holiday – will all be impacted by these follies of a few, including our current government.
How to move forward? What we need is more self-employed, small businesses, home businesses. We need people who understand what it mean to make money. People who understand and care enough to realize when we are being lied too and given the famous Labour spin.
The banks enjoy a special status in our society, they should not be allowed to abuse this status. If they do they need to be asked to repay the damage that they have caused. Not only the loans that they were given, but also all the damage they have caused us personally with their reckless behavior.
If you and I go out and cause reckless damage, we will be ordered by a court to pay for the damage. What is happening here? All the talk is about remuneration for bankers, profits in Q3 and so on. The banks should not make a profit until they paid for the damage they have caused us all.
As for this government, I have no words for the unbelievable spin and deceit of the British population. – ST.
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