Larkland Morley’s Professional Blog

Posted via web from lmorley’s posterous

Since I am a network and communications person, I would like to share some of the ideas I have for a small business to communicate effectively using very reliable and sophisticated modern facilities.

Domain Name:

Its good to have a proper domain name that reflects your business name. Good source

godaddy.com

Web hosting

You will need to host your website somewhere with good storage and reliability and great customer service – Best place

hostgator.com

Website Platform

While you may need a good e-commerce platform to sell products online directly, best practices nowadays for most business is to have a blog as the front end to the business. This can be structured in different ways based on your desires. The recommendation here is:

wordpress.org

This platform is free and you could also get it through your hostgator account, so its makes the installation much easier.

General E-mail

To communicate outside and inside your organization you will need some basic e-mail platform. Normally, the first thing that comes to mind is outlook e-mail platform, which means you need a server etc.. A very cool solution and I am sure there are many others is:

Google Apps – http://www.google.com/apps/

This allows you to setup e-mails on your domain name for both internal and external use. Its just as simple as using gmail but its coming from your own domain and would look much better to the outside world for corporate presence. I am sure there are others and in fact google is coming out with Google wave soon that would even help your internal communication much better.

Fax Communication

There are numerous services out there that will allow you to reliably send and receive faxes directly from your PC without moving. In some cases, you may need to have a scanner available to capture documents that needs signature etc. In any case in mostly you can send a document in PDF format through e-mail but its still good to have the fax option for traditional purposes. This is one I have tested and looks good so far.

http://www.maxemail.com/

There are many others out there.

Telephone

This is an area that has changed quite a bit with the advent of voip, now with a small business, you don’t need to have a major PBX installed. One option you have is to buy a small box that connects to your DSL connection but even that you may not need nowadays.

One cheap option to look at is Skype.com especially if your employees are not in the same location. You can buy accessories that will let skype behave just like a regular office phone and even wireless if you so desire. Skype also allows you to buy a payment plan and get a phone number for incoming calls. You could tie into your mobile phone such as Iphone or Android.

Otherwise, if you want a standard looking phone system, look into hosted PBX options. I am not in a position to recommend one over the other but I will list a few that looks interesting to pursue.

Here is a good place to look – http://www.voipreview.org/Business_Telephone_Systems/compare_business_voip_providers.aspx

Look at Google voice too, very interesting little tool especially when you are mobile.

Internet Access

To get all of these services to work well, at least not all of them since the webservice is running from a different server, you need a physical connection to your home or office. If your employees work from home then you need for each employee, at least to re-imburse for them using their personal connections.

Typical DSL is the preferred choice for this type of setup. Othewise maybe cable could be a good second.

Can’t recommend a provider as its dependent on where you are located. In the US, ATT would be the most common in most locations and in Canada, it would be bell.ca.

Coming very soon is the world of wireless 4G networks that will give you DSL speed pretty much anywhere but it will take about another 5 years to get full coverage at these speeds.

Social Communications

The next important step outside of using e-mail is how do you communicate with your audience effectively. The first step and almost an absolute requirement is a blog. The next tool to add into that would be twitter.com regardless of the audience type.

Now in terms of your client base, you may have to look into what medium is suited in terms of other tools. If your business is consumer based, then facebook.com is recommended, otherwise if its business/corporate oriented you could look at linkedin.com.

Other tools that could help your business are facilities such as google groups or yahoo groups. There are a lot of free social forum platforms that you could tie into your website especially for customer interaction as well. a good one to look at is ning.com

To close off, you may want to have a mailing tool to manage paying customer as well. The popular platform for this is aweber.com.

These tools used in the correct way can create the image of a powerful organization since you are pretty much on par with larger companies at very minimal cost.

Posted via web from lmorley’s posterous

Checking out the many free Webinars and Seminars offered by wealth making gurus, it sometimes seem that they always present having a normal job is a major sin. I disagree with that view 100%. Bottom line, it depends on what you want. You could work hard and smart then get promoted and make good money as an employee anyway. The real approach again, is to know what you want then work towards it. Now I agree with them that if you approach this in a naive way, you will not achieve that ultimate goal. Here are some pointers I have in mind for the average or any person.

1. The Employee – This means you don’t have a problem working for someone since you probably like the job of executing in specific field such as Art, Engineering, Software, accounting etc. The basic motto in this role is to focus on saving and investment. Notice I used the word investment. This will be the key to giving you some security long term. Saving is not enough as inflation and other factors will wipe it out. The other issue with employment is that you could seek out ventures or employers that provides reasonable equity in the business. This would allow you to see the fruits of your labor over time.

2. The Investor – This person is someone that focuses on funding projects by whatever means. This could be indirect as in using the stock market or directly into a known venture. Typically with this approach, you would need cash or access to cash from other people. It may not be wise to depend too much on bank money to achieve this. A way get money for this would be investing in Shelf Corporations with funding then use that funding to participate in high returns programs (won’t say much on that here yet).  The proceeds could then fund your venture of choice. Bear in mind that investing could just mean you own a couple properties with good income generation and stability. Especially with an interest in leisure traveling, you may not want something that constantly need your attention.

3.  The Business Person- This person is literally a combination of the Employee and Investor. In other words, they are using their skills and investment interest to create one or more businesses. Most times a business person need to be fully involved upfront to get things going then as time passes they can move into more of an investor role in that venture. The key to being a good business person is to test your ideas at all times and focus on the big picture. Where do you want to go with this? Always get help in as many aspects as you can early. This means having a successful business person as a mentor is very good idea. One simple way to start is to look into acquiring a franchise as this has some leg work already done. All you need in that case is the capital and proper location for the business. The same approach would be recommended as those of the investor. Use Shelf Corporation credit to generate cash then you would have more leverage to accelerate your business.

In all of this, there is one thing I agree with the seminar producers and wealth coaches, you want to achieve your freedom day. Now this freedom could be different for everyone. One option is to have less liability while having a job where you can get some good vacation.  If you look at this in terms of freedom day, then you will not be too greedy while confident enough to achieve your goals.

More to Come, next time