I’ve been running my own small business for several years now and from the beginning I’ve had a “Work Smarter Not Harder” attitude. One of the hardest parts of running your own business is worrying about the everyday things: project management, billing, taxes, insurance and more. With an attitude of keeping things as simple as possible, it’s been important for me to run my business with outside help regarding the aspects of operation I’m not interested in or adept at performing.
A lot of the accounting functions of my business I handle with software, and when it comes to tax time, I visit a certified accountant to deal with my filings. I use project management software to keep tabs on my client work and to track changes and shifts in each deal as they occur. As for insurance, I use a local agent who has always had my best interests in mind and has constantly found me good rates.
The video below is a promotional one from the folks at Mavenlink who offer some of the services for small businesses I mentioned above. The goal at Mavenlink is to consolidate all of your small business needs into one easy to use destination. Check out the video to learn more.
I was recently in Chicago for a short vacation and took the leap and went without taking my laptop. This was a big step for me, as I’m usually chained to my laptop whenever I leave home, and it was all thanks to the emergence of mobile broadband. I’m an AT&T customer with a shiny new iPhone so I was able to leverage the power of my phone and the broadband network connection to do everything I am used to doing on my laptop with my mobile instead.
With high speed mobile broadband I was able to check my mail, look up directions and even get a little bit of work done while walking the streets of Chicago. I was able to keep up with my favorite team’s scores (even some play-by-play) as we hopped from restaurant to restaurant and to the various tourist attractions around town.
This would have never been possible with my old cell phone. I would have had to carry around with me paper maps and notes or, even worse, had to look like a lost tourist and ask the locals for directions everywhere. Having access to broadband was also a huge money saver. I didn’t have to pay for Internet access in our snooty downtown hotel or pay for cabs to destinations I found out were within walking distance.
I’m always on the lookout these days for easy to use and simple to setup website builder programs. As a freelance web developer with a growing client base I find that programs like NetIDNow’s WebStudio offer a simple solution for my smaller clients to create a website.
Most of my tinier clients are small business owners without the expertise or budgets for a large and elaborate site that might be, quite frankly, a little over the top for their needs anyway. With a program like WebStudio, these clients can build and maintain their own sites without having the professional knowledge or skills that I have. At the same time, the quality of site they can offer to their customers and people interested in learning more about their business is of a high enough quality to pass as a professionally done web site.
And, thankfully, WebStudio also offers ecommerce solutions. This is especially important to me as many of the potential clients I steer in the direction of programs like WebStudio are very interested in selling things online but don’t have the slightest idea where to start with the process. By simplifying ecommerce, NetIDNow has put together an excellent web site creation suite for many businesses looking to get started on the web.
I lot of people starting blogs for the first time are typically disappointed in the amount of traffic their sites receive. It’s not uncommon for a new blogger to find themselves unmotivated to the point of quitting as time moves on and the number of visitors they see never increases. One of the keys to getting traffic is to rank highly in search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, for specific search terms related to your blog’s topic. By using some basic search engine optimisation techniques you can see your site rise in search results and begin to see more visitors coming to read your blog.
So what’s the easiest way to work on the search engine optimisation of your blog? Well, if you’re using WordPress (and that’s most likely true if you’re reading this blog right now) than you have a good start right out of the gate. WordPress is built with an underlying framework that makes it easy for themes to be search engine efficient. The coding and order of the site’s elements are typically fashioned in such a manner to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your site.
Aside from your blogging software, much of the onus is on you as a writer to help get your blog high in the search results. Write with your keywords in mind and use them throughout your posts. If you’re interested in ranking in Google for the term “paper airplanes” than make sure that phrase appears in your blog frequently. Another tip is to try and get links back to your blog from other sites related to paper airplanes. A combination of high quality back links and well written content will help raise your blog in the search engines.
WordPress.com offers a lot of features to their users at a small price each year. You can get extra storage, CSS options and ad removal each with their own fee. The question I have to ask is are these features, all added together, worth the price? Or would someone looking to expand their blog with more customization be better off finding their own web hosting package and using the open source WordPress.org software to run their blog?
Your Own Domain – You can have your WordPress.com blog run by their service but using your own domain for $10/year. That’s the same fee for that same price by yourself or you can use WordPress.com’s domain register for an extra $15/year.
Extra Storage – All WordPress.com accounts come with 3GB of storage but you can expand that storage in blocks of 5GB. So for an extra 5G you’d pay $20/year, 15GB for $50/year and 25GB for $90/year. Any web host worth their weight can offer you similar space options for equal or lower prices.
Custom CSS – You can gain the ability to customize your own CSS on your blog for $15/year. With WordPress.org this is obviously free.
Go Ad-Free – For $30/year, WordPress.com will stop running their ads on your blog. Let’s think about this for a second. A small blog probably doesn’t even generate $30/year in revenue for WordPress.com when the ads run normally. This is a huge win for WordPress.com in most cases.
Final Verdict
If you host a blog on WordPress.com and are considering upgrading to any of these premium features I strongly, strongly suggest you think twice. For much less money you can find quality web hosting that will give you even more benefits than what WordPress.com can offer you.
