Small Office, Home Office Information

Well tonight instead of watching the football I finally did something that I have been meaning to do for a long time. I’ve started a newsletter and you can download the first one in a pdf file at this link Small Office, Home Office Information Newsletter

We have a new VOIP provider here in Australia with a really good deal of customers. To use it though you need a special Netcomm attachement for your computer. The VOIP company has plenty of the attachments and they distribute them through a major computer wholesaler down in Brisbane - our state capital.

We talked about promoting them through the computer shop that we’re involved in and 10 were brought in for a trial. There were a vew hassles to work through but now everything works fine and we really like the product because it does cut down on our phone bills.

It’s especially good because businesses using the same VOIP provider can call each other without incurring any charges at all.

The wholesaler that the computer shop deals with is even connected to the system and so you would think it wouldn’t be a problem to pick up the VOIP phone and call them to place an order.

We certainly thought that but unfortunately the wholesaler doesn’t seem to think so. Instead when anyone dials the wholesaler’s VOIP number they get a recorded message directing them to call on the normal landline.

I wonder what message that sends?

Does your small business send messages like that?

Hopefully it will never happen to you but there are times when it could become necessary for your small business to down-size.

I don’t know about you but somehow I really dislike that term and didn’t want to use it but it did fit rather well.

Laying people off because of their incompetence, laziness or because of economic conditions is never easy but when it needs to be done then it needs to be done in a way that not only helps your small business but also helps the staff who are being shown the door.

I came across an interesting post by Guy Kawasaki called The Art of the Layoff that you might find useful the next time you need to let some staff go from your small business.

Ok, I’m back and my absence can’t be blamed on the holidays - the 4th July is just another day of the year here in Australia. I would have been back yesterday but something I ate on Monday night gave me a lot of very unhappy returns so yesterday was all down to recovery

So what to talk about today - well something that Toni and I have been suggesting for quite some time and that is that the pay-per-click model of advertising is not going to last.

For those of you who don’t know what pay-per-click advertising is let me point you to the bar of advertising that appears on the right hand side of every page you get when you do a search on Google. With Google it’s called Adwords or Adsense depending on whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher (website owner).

The reason that pay-per-click will go is click fraud and that happens when advertisers have to pay for clicks that hit their ads that come from publishers rather than genuine surfers who are interested in buying the product that the advertiser is selling.

Click fraud is costing advertisers a huge amount of money and Google and the others who offer pay-per-click advertising are unable to prevent it. Just how big a problem it’s becoming can be seen in the article at the other end of this link.

So if your small business makes money from pay-per-click advertising on your website then it really is time to start looking at other revenue streams because pay-per-click is going to dry up.

More and more small business people are using laptops these days and laptop theft is on the rise. Plenty of people carry their small business around with them in the data they store on the hard drive of their laptop.

So when their laptop gets stolen their small business takes a massive hit. When Toni and I are on the road we rely on our laptops to keep us in touch with our business and with our clients but we take some precautions to safeguard our data.

We never keep important data on the laptop. Instead we either keep it stored where we can access it online or we keep it in removable storage devices such as thumb drives and we keep those entirely separate from the laptops.

While that may protect the data there are also some things you can do to reduce the risk of having your laptop taken and you can find some advice about that here