6 FREE tools no business should be without
The way to a successful business is to make sure you keep your costs down and hopefully help push your profits up. Whether you are just starting out with your business or further down the line, there is certainly no shame in taking advantage of the large number of free tools out there that can help organise, inform and drive your business forward. Here’s 6 we think every business should be using: 1 Skype – www.skype.com It’s still amazing how many people think Skype is just an online telephone service. It is much more and the functions are constantly being added to. Sure the built-in games aren’t going to be high on your business list, but the ability for free voice calls and video calls between Skype users should be, along with the online messenger function which is a great way to keep remote workers engaged as part of a team and can also be used to transfer the odd file too. If you need HD business conferencing, then the Skype app that comes with Office 365 has you covered. 2 Dropbox – www.dropbox.com There are countless others out there too but in terms of power, reliability and ease of use Dropbox leads the way in storing, sharing and syncing files and documents from different devices and computers. The 2GB free storage is enough for most of those essential files, so you can make sure your phone, tablet, laptop and desktop PC all have access to the latest versions of your files. The ability to privately share a folder too also makes it a good choice for sending large files to clients to check. 3 Google Analytics – www.google.co.uk/analytics/ If you were new to the web you’d be forgiven for thinking the power and functionality of this system should be costing you £££s every month, that most would be very willing to invest for the results that can be obtained. Ironically, the fact that it is free means it is frequently ignored. Make sure you spend some time getting to know what functions are available and make sure you use them. Drill-down regularly to analyse your traffic and make sure you set and regularly review your goals. 4 Google Alerts – www.google.co.uk/alerts Another one from the Google stable that offers the kind of insight you would probably be willing to pay £££s for. Use it to set up automatic alerts to research the internet for you. Track mentions of your brands, your name, your industry and competitors and all for free and in a neat easy-to-understand system. Get alerts emailed or just listed and stay ahead of any trouble-brewing on forums, news-sites, etc and also find those singing your praises so you can thank them and embrace them. 5 HootSuite – www.hootsuite.com There are a whole host of free social media management tools out there, but the free version of HootSuite is probably the easiest to use and most powerful of the non-paid-for options. You can manage accounts across your brand from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn and even WordPress. Add your posts, choose the channels – including multi-channel posts and then analyse the reports. You get up to 5 social network profiles on a free account which is more than enough for any new start-up. 6 MailChimp – www.mailchimp.com If you are going to collect customers you need a quick and simple way to stay in contact with them. Social media will help to an extent but an email still has authority and substance, especially if it arrives in a branded HTML version, which this email management tool offers. It’s free up to the first 2,000 subscribers on your email list, so plenty of scope to kick-start your business. Template based and wizard driven, spend a couple of hours and you will soon be email marketing like an experienced professional. In respect of each of these tools there are others out there and you may want to check the competition too as every business is different and another product may offer a particular functionality essential to your business. What is important is that you are making the most of what is available to you for free. Running a business is costly enough without overlooking the very tools that could lead you to success without even dipping into your finances.
Was it a Budget for Business?
This week’s Budget setting out the Government’s updated economic strategy wasn’t packed with too many surprises, but did you spot the main elements that may affect your business? Whatever your politics, here’s our quick run down of the main points you may like to look at in more depth. You can find full details of the Budget announcements on the HM Treasury website Super-connected Cities A re-confirmation that Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle have been selected to become broadband super-connected cities. The £100 million investment was first announced in the 2011 Autumn Statement and a further £50m has been announced to fund a second wave of cities. Corporation Tax cut In an attempt to spur on more companies to drive the economy forward, the main rate of corporation tax is to be reduced by an additional one per cent. The rate will now reduce from 26 per cent to 24 per cent in April 2012 and then to 23 per cent in April 2013 before a further reductio to 22 per cent by April 2014. Corporation Tax relief for certain tech Subject to final state aid approval, new Corporation Tax reliefs will be introduced from April 2013 for the video games, animation and high-end television industries. Simplification of small business taxation The Government has announced a consultation, reference introducing a voluntary cash basis for unincorporated businesses up to the VAT registration threshold as well as a simplified expenses system for business use of cars, motorcyles and homes as well as the possibility of a disincorporation relief. VAT Threshold increase From this April, the VAT taxable turnover threshold, governing who must be registered for VAT will be increased from £73,000 to £77,000. Income Tax changes For those lucky enough to be earning over £150,000 you are probably well aware that the top rate of income tax will be reduced from 50% to 45% in April 2013. The key change however, affecting almost everybody in the working world, is the rise in the basic individual income tax personal allowance to increase by a further £1,100 – taking it to £9,205 in total – also by April 2013. Enterprise Management Incentive Scheme This scheme designed to help SMEs recruit and retain talent is set to provide additional support to help start-ups access the scheme and more than double the grant limit to £250,000. A more detailed blog about this scheme is already planned by 123-reg in the next few weeks. Obviously, there are many other aspects that will impact on your business but we believe these will be the main items you probably need to be considering in the next few months. We will be following up on a number of these points in our business-focused blogs in the next few weeks.
Could a hacker really kill your website … and your business?
When you’re dealing with the day-to-day issues of running a website (not to mention running a business), worrying about security can come way down your list of priorities. And that’s understandable: if your website’s never been hacked or attacked, it’s hard to grasp quite how much damage it can cause. After all, why would hackers target your site at all with so many higher-profile targets out there? Big brands like Lush and Adidas, media outlets like The Sun and Gawker and some less salubrious sites have all come under attack in recent memory. Website hackers turn to smaller targets However, online criminals are increasingly turning towards smaller businesses. With fewer resources to dedicate to online security, they’re easy targets, as the Wall Street Journal article has explained: Hacking at small businesses “is a prolific problem,” says Dean Kinsman, a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyber division, which has more than 400 active investigations into these crimes. “It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.” And don’t let yourself be lulled into a false sense of security because that article focuses on US websites. Website hackers don’t have to respect national borders. They can go wherever the easiest targets are. Some hackers do it for fun or to cause disruption. Others do it just to prove they can. But nowadays, many have more sinister motives. Quite simply, there’s serious money to be made in website hacking. From stealing credit card details to committing business identity theft to harvesting names and addresses to sell to spammers, all too often hacking is motivated by hard profit. The damage website hackers can cause If you’re still not convinced that protecting your website should be higher up your list of priorities, it’s worth taking a minute to understand the sort of consequences you could face if a website hacker gained unauthorised access to some or all of your website files: Lost business is the most obvious and immediate problem. If your online shopping site gets compromised you might have to suspend trading or close the site altogether. But simply having to divert resources into securing a hacked website will take you away from other tasks. Your reputation can take a beating if word gets out that your site has been hacked. It takes a long time to rebuild trust with existing and potential customers and suppliers. Sure, its hard to quantify that damage, but it can be very significant. You could lose vital data too. If you don’t regularly backup your customer list, a hacker could destroy it in a few seconds. That would mean losing the details of hundreds or maybe thousands of happy customers who’d buy from you again if only you got in touch. Search engines might penalise your website. Search engines like Google actively blacklist hacked websites to avoid them causing harm to internet users. But it can take a while to get a blacklisting lifted – research has found found the average length of a blacklisting is 13 days – meaning you’re in real trouble if you rely on search engines for traffic. Fixing things is a total headache. Trust us on this one. It takes real time and effort to put right a hacked site – often the only safe thing to do is to delete everything and start again. It takes time and – if you need to bring in an external supplier – costs money. If it’s not quite registered with you yet, suffering from a website hacking attack can cause significant disruption. If you’re relying on your website to maintain your business cash flow, a serious incident can cripple or even destroy your business. If you’re not already thinking about website security, it’s about time you did: There’s great website security advice available from Get Safe Online Mashable has some excellent information about how to cope if you get hacked Ten ways to beef up your website security
Twitter’s Free Analytics
Do you know how much traffic Twitter is bringing to your site? Wouldn’t you like to get in-depth information on how your content is being shared across Twitter? With Twitter’s new Web Analytics tool you can measure the amount of traffic that Twitter is sending to your site and see exactly which type of content your followers enjoy more. This is actually a useful tool to measure the effectiveness of not only your Twitter campaigns, but your overall activity on this social network. It is not available for all Twitter accounts but comes as part of the Twitter for Business package, with analytics provided for both promoted (paid for) activity and free activity. The Twitter Web Analytics tool is powered by BackType, a social analytics company acquired by Twitter a few months ago, so it was only normal that it would be put to good use. Fortunately. the tool, currently in beta, is free to use and every site owner with a Twitter account will get the chance to test it out in a few weeks. What does Twitter’s Analytics tool bring to the table? According to their official blog entry there are three main benefits of using this tool. Once you use Twitter’s Web Analytics tool you should get a better understanding of: How much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network You will see in detail how much of your site content is being shared across Twitter. You will get more insights on the number of tweets and those of click-throughs to your site. Unlike Google Analytics, which most of us are using to get some of this information, with Twitter’s Analytics tool you can also see the path that the user took to get to your site. You’ll get to see how and who is sharing your content across Twitter. The amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site This is the kind of information you can currently find using Google Analytics, but it was only normal to have access to it using this tool. How effective your Tweet Button integration is This is also something you can currently do with several website plug-ins but it would be interesting to see how much in-depth information will Twitter’s Analytics tool be showing us. Why you need Twitter Web Analytics Well, that’s obvious – we’re all using Twitter but we still know little about how effective our marketing efforts are. This is a tool that can help all marketers determine what they’re doing right, what type of strategies generate results and which ones need to be improved.
Facebook’s Gestures will make more businesses like them
Facebook is about to get more important for Business. Fact. I quite often hear people saying “Yeh, but Facebook is for family and friends not business, right?” and then normally spend the next 10 or 20 minutes to convince them it isn’t so. It doesn’t always work. To many, the informality of Facebook, the way you can banter with ex-school-mates and existing office colleagues alike, doesn’t lend itself well to ‘promoting a brand”. Yet last week’s announcement from Facebook about the changes coming to their portal is about to make Facebook even more important and a vital business tool. We often recite the mantra of ‘Content is King’ and until now Facebook (despite already hosting 4% of all photographs ever taken in the world) hasn’t really towed the line with that one, until now. Facebook is moving to a more newsy type-look and will be placing content on a more newsworthy basis. Content now is very important on Facebook. What changes? From the 30th September (i.e. today) Facebook will no longer be driven by a long line of posts from those a user has linked to but instead a Timeline and a set of organised post. In fact it is an intelligent timeline that will create more a chronological story or scrapbook than just a series of posts. If you’ve ever seen the impressive Flipboard app on the iPad you will get the idea. Facebook is looking to organise us. That includes the basic like function. This is being opened out to developers given them more scope to create their own versions connected to online activities. That is likely to make users more savvy as to who, what and when they like. So Facebook will decide what is relevant content to us and place this in our timeline. As a user though you won’t miss out on the other content completely, that will be available as part of a rolling ‘ticker’ on of each user’s home page. Dspite this apparent information gatekeeping, Facebook claims the new changes will allow you more control over what appears as a top news item as, users will be given more options over these sorts of preferences via new setting controls. The idea is that with one quick glance users will easily catch-up on the actions of their important friends over the past 24 hours without having to scroll through countless updates “you should see the things you’re most interested in” claim Facebook, yes but not necessarily the most recent. To the writer this move is perhaps more about understanding where Facebook sits alongside other social networks. During the recent UK riots, during live sporting events and reality tv shows, the ‘as live’ action and interaction has taken place on Twitter not Facebook. Twitter has almost become the default for immediacy, Facebook something more of a reflection. In tradtional analogy, Twitter is to TV and radio what Facebook is now becoming to newspapers and magazines. Again that makes content on Facebook even more important. If you are a business, the stronger or more unique your message the better the chance it will attract interest from an audience. From a user perspective the chances are their top news will become stale for those who log on more than once per day, so any new engaging content will be lapped up The true impact – and whether it makes Facebook users leave in droves or new sign-ups happen – won’t be seen for months yet, but we suggest you concentrate on ensuring what you have on Facebook is as up to date and relevant to your daily business as possible. Let us know what you think of the new look Facebook.
Video interview with Laura Rigney co-founder of MumpreneurUK
If you read our blog of yesterday you will know that we attended the very successful MumpreneurUK annual Conference and Awards over the weekend. While we were there, we caught up with co-founder Laura Rigney and asked her what MumpreneurUK is all about, why mumpreneurs are overcoming the current economic crisis and what it takes to be a successful mumpreneur. Don’t forget to check out the other videos on the 123-reg YouTube channel too.
Mumpreneurs are leading the way
If ever the politicians needed an example of how British resolve will pull the country clear of these sad ecomomic times, they needn’t look much further than the working mum (or dad). It sounds clichéd but most parents would do anything for their kids and whereas once that used to be taking on a couple of extra part-time jobs, many are now turning to starting up their own business, especially via the internet. 123-reg were lucky enough to be a sponsor at yesterday’s MumpreneurUK Annual Conference and Awards event and the creativity, positivity and passion in a room of 150 entrepreneurs (mainly mums, but a handful of dads too) was electrifying. The organisation set up by mums Laura Rigney and Amanda Farren in 2009 celebrates and supports mumpreneurs who they define as “a mum who juggles running a business with family life” and lets would be mumpreneurs know that starting a business is achievable, whatever your background. There were book publishers, book sellers, toy sellers, theatre groups, support organisations, PR gurus, keepsake producers and many, many more; all assembled to network, learn off inspirational speakers and seminar hosts but more importantly, they were there to celebrate each others success and support each other – there was a lot of love in the room. There was also a lot of positivity about how the internet has changed their lives and helped businesses compete and flourish. So many of those assembled were tweeting and connecting to the web that the in-house WiFi consistently crashing became a talking point of the day. There wasn’t one person there who didn’t already have a web presence and it was nice to meet with so many 123-reg customers with lots of positive stories of their dealings with us, but also to help solve some niggling issues about the next steps online for their business. It was a day of sharing knowledge and ideas all round. If you missed the event, have a look at the Twitter hashtag #mumpreneur11 to see what went on and we’ll be posting up our exclusive interview with MumpreneurUK founder Laura Rigney soon to, so watch this space. UPDATE 27/09/11: View the interview here. Finally, big congratulaions to Suzanne Dibble of Lawyers4mumpreneurs who won the Best Supporting Business Award sponsored by 123-reg and seemed a very popular winner.
Business Elite take to Twitter
Whether it is an attempt to be down with the kids, or simply identifying the networking and business growth potential of the Twittersphere, a new survey from CNBC entitled Europe’s Mobile Elite 2011, shows more than a third of Europe’s top business leaders are now using Twitter. 61% of the respondents said they believed social media was changing the way they did business and 45% admitted they feared being unable to keep pace with technology as it applies to their industry. Wanting to stay ever connected to what is going on in their business smartphone usage is up with iPhone leading the way (21%) followed closely by Blackberry (20%) but Android catching up fast at (14%). 15% of those surveyed also now own an iPad, the majority combining it for business and pleasure – 49% claiming their children use it at home. On the social media front however it is Twitter stealing the headlines. Whilst Facebook remains the most used (down to 77% from 81% last year), Linked-in continues to grow (56%) and Twitter (38% from 30%) is finally being recognised as a high-flying business tool. 18% of the executives surveyed admitted to having accounts for all three of the social networks. With more and more of business decision makers taking to social networks for themselves, it is hoped that the ‘buy in’ frustrations experienced by many looking for social media investment could begin to decrease.