Small Office, Home Office Information

Well I’m writing the draft for this post in something I never thought I would use … an online word processor. I have to admit that for a long time I’ve had some reservations about online software and I’ve written about those reservations here. Now though, because we’ve split our office between town and home Toni and I sometimes need to work on the same document from both offices. By having the document available online we don’t have to keep on emailing it to each other.

So here I am using Peepel … a full suite of office programmes that you’ll find at Peepel.com. Peepel is an Australian company and the programme is still in beta but you can sign up for a free account without an invitation. Perhaps it’s something that your small business could use to overcome the same challenges that Toni and I face in our work almost every day.

I’ll see how it goes over the next couple of weeks and let you know.

Well last Friday I made a bold statement and declared that we were heading out to enjoy some fun time at the Business Hervey Bay’s regular monthly get-together that night but sometimes things don’t always go according to plan in even the best-run small business and our plans went out the window.

Friday lunchtime one of those websites that had been put back a few days was suddenly back on the immediate agenda and the owner wanted it online just as quick as we could get it there. So instead of partying Friday night we worked and by lunchtime Saturday the webssite for an absolute beachfront cafe in Hervey Bay was live and everyone was happy.

We always like to keep our customers happy and we’re prepared to work hard … and for long hours … to keep them that way because happy customers who aren’t ignored or left on their own once they’ve paid their account will keep on coming back for more.

If you want to succeed in your small business that’s what you’ve got to do.

This coming week we’ve got some more hours to put into two e-commerce sites and I’ve got a couple of days search engine optimisation work ahead of me for one of our media clients in the US. It should be fun.

Wow it’s Friday already … where has the week gone?

We started out with the goal of launching three e-commerce sites and two other sites for clients this week and we almost got there. One e-commerce site will launch later today, the launch of another has been postponed till October 1 because the client now wants to add even more stock to it and each item will have it’s own individual keyword-rich description and sales text and the third e-commerce site was mine and we had to postpone that till next week because so much other urgent text and SEO work came in.

Of the other two sites, one is on hold because the client has been too busy to get together with us for the final appraisal the second … for an award winning home builder in Hervey Bay went live yesterday afternoon. Today there’s still plenty of work to do but this evening we’re off to socialize with other small business people here in Hervey Bay … it should be fun.

And no matter how busy you get in your small business you too should take time to step away from the business and just have some fun.

It’s been an interesting week with lots of changes on the Web to keep up with and plenty of work coming through the door from new and regular customers. Word-of-mouth has got to be the best advertising you can ever invest in and that’s a concept that so many small businesses still fail to understand.

Of course times are tough and likely to get a whole lot tougher for the small business sector so I thought I would share this page with you. It’s a list of 51 different free computer programmes. Not all of them will be suitable for your business and some - like the registry cleaner - I would NEVER use but there are others that you will find useful.

There’s OpenOffice that gives you a whole suite of office software, PDFCreator that can creat PDF files from any printable document and plenty more that you may find useful.

If you advertise your small business or home based business where do you advertise?

Do you have complete control over where your advertising appears?

Of course if you advertise in the newspapers you do have some control over that advertising but what if you advertise on the Net and have your ads placed by an advertising network? How much control do you have then … and is it really important?

Some recent research has found that wrong positioned ads do damage brands and if you follow the link you’ll be able to read more about it.