Now your small business can mean Big Business!

November 15th, 2009

From SME Technology Summit Gold Sponsor Salesforce.com:

Find out how Salesforce.com can help your business better manage your customer information including:
• Identify more opportunities
• Increase sales and manage more customers
• Increase customer satisfaction and improve relationships
• Access customer and sales information from anywhere
• Control costs and forecast more accurately
• Run your business more efficiently and boost your profits

The Salesforce.com Small Business centre includes free immediate access to:
• Webinar series for small and midsize businesses
• Sales success map
• 30-day free trial of Salesforce CRM
• “9 Key Plays for CRM Success” white paper

Salesforce.com is the world’s most popular sales tool, helping over 60,000 organisations to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction with our pay-as-you-go subscription

Find out more at www.salesforce.com/au/smallbusinesscenter or come and see us at the SME Technology Summit

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SmartCompany webinar to feature SME Tech Summit speakers

November 12th, 2009

SmartCompany magazine is running a webinar on Monday 16 November at 2pm: How Small and Mid-Sized Companies are Using Technology to Drive Business Success.

The webinar will provide a preview to some of the outstanding content at SME Technology Summit.

Amanda Gome, Publisher of SmartCompany, will moderate the discussion and share some of her insights in running a young and rapidly growing company, as well in covering the best of what’s happening in small and mid-sized business in Australia.

Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, will discuss how companies can best take advantage of online outsourcing to build efficiencies, scale operations, and grow companies rapidly.

Suzi Dafnis, Community Director of Australian Businesswomen’s Network, will draw on her extensive experience in building online communities using blogs, forums and other tools.

David James, CEO of Brasserie Bread, will share how he has rapidly grown a real-world business using Twitter and other social media tools.

See the full SME Technology Summit agenda for details of what they will be speaking about and where they fit into the array of valuable content available on the day.

And be sure to register for the webinar to get these speakers great insights! There will be three complimentary passes to the Summit drawn at the end of the webinar.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Small to Medium Enterprise

November 3rd, 2009

Looking at CRM solutions for your business can be a weighty task. There are so many options out there from powerful paid tools to free and simple options.

If you’re still not convinced about what you can do with a CRM system, this article from Smart Company explains the power of CRM.

What ever you decide on, researching how the CRM tool meets your needs can be the most difficult part of the choice.

Australian small business site Sage Business has outlined the Top Five things to look for in a CRM that can be used as an excellent guide on how to kick off your product research.

Key elements include:

* Making a comprehensive list of what you need out of a CRM system and what you may need in the future.
* Settle on your budget (and a timeframe for expenditure) before undertaking your research.
* Understand your IT support capabilities. Ask how much maintenance your CRM system will need.
* How well does the system fit with other programs used?
* Are there any specifics about your industry that a CRM system will need to meet?

There will be far more on customer relationship management tools and how to use them to improve your business at the SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December.

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How fast is social media growing? Watch it live!

November 2nd, 2009

We keep on hearing statistics about how big social media is, how fast Facebook and Twitter are growing, and the extraordinary acceleration of the web.

This fabulous widget from Gary Hayes shows precisely how fast the online world is growing.

If you are running a business, is this something you want to ignore? Or if you want to find out how to tap the potential of this explosion, come to our SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December!

Be sure to check out Gary Hayes’ blog PersonalizeMedia, which offers fascinating insights across social media, virtual worlds, gaming, personalization and story telling.

Posted in Resources | 1 Comment »

The top 10 blogs for small to mid-sized businesses

November 2nd, 2009

Blog search engine Technorati recently revised its blog ranking algorithms and created categories for the rankings.

The list of the top 10 blogs for small business provides an excellent resource for attendees of our SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December, where there will be deep insights into all of the topics covered by these blogs.

Many of these blogs are for businesses of all sizes, but all of them provide valuable insights for small to mid-sized businesses. Check them out!

1. Online Marketing Blog

http://www.toprankblog.com

sbtech1
Covers digital marketing topics, focusing on social media, online PR and search engine marketing. A broad team of writers brings diverse perspectives to bear.

2. Affiliate X Files

http://www.affiliatexfiles.com

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Specializes in affiliate marketing issues, with a wide range of in-depth articles.

3. Social Media Today

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC

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Brings together selected blog posts from 60 leading thinkers on social media and Web 2.0.

4. Brian Solis – PR 2.0

http://www.briansolis.com

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The first single person blog (with occasional guest posts) is by Brian Solis, leading thinker on the future of marketing and PR. Brian spoke at The Insight Exchange’s Future of Influence Summit.

5. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog

sbtech5
Jeremiah provides extensive research and insights on his blog, to complement his work over the years as a social media practitioner, analyst at Forrester Research, and now partner at Altimeter Group.

6. Altitude Branding

http://altitudebranding.com

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Author Amber Naslund is Director of Community for leading social media monitoring platform Radian6, blogging here about elevating brands through social media.

7. BrandSavant

http://brandsavant.com

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Tom Webster writes about how to gain insights into brands from the vast amount of data generated by social media.

8. Convince and Convert Blog

http://www.convinceandconvert.com

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Jay Baer writes about social media, including tools, tips, interviews and analysis of the emerging landscape.

9. Duct Tape Marketing

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog

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Duct Tape Marketing focuses explicitly on small business marketing, not just technology but across all the activities that will build customers and business.

10. VA4Growth

http://va4growth.com/blog

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A resource site for social media marketing, run by a company specializing in providing Virtual Assistants.

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SMEs making it to the top of search rankings

November 1st, 2009

Being at the top of a Google search is real advantage for any business, small or large, but getting there is another story.

There is a lot of advice out there about getting your website to the top of a search engine, so a considered and thoughtful approach will save you from being overwhelmed.

The SEOmozBlog‘s Danny Dover has made a comprehensive check list out of his experiences promoting the website of a local preschool. His major tips include:

1. Get to know your keywords and don’t just use the few that are most obvious to you. Sign up for Google Adwords and learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” and “ad text ideas” generator.
2. Add your company address and phone number on every page. The search engines are smart enough to detect address and phone number formats.
3. If your business has a local focus, hunt down local directories and sign your business up to them all.
4. Get more links from other websites. Consider your local chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links pointing at locally targeted websites.
5. Optimize your site from Google’s side by logging into Google Webmaster Tools and clicking on the Tools menu. You will want to set the correct geographical target and preferred domain.

There will be far more on search engine optimization and how it can have a positive impact on your business at the SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December.

Tags: business, improve, medium, ranking, rankings, Search, search engine, SEO, small, tips
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Tips for small business owners from Google’s search guru Matt Cutts

October 31st, 2009

In the world of search Google’s Matt Cutts is about the closest you’ll get to a rock star. He is head of the webspam group at Google, specialising in search optimisation issues.

This video interview with Matt is specifically intended to provide advice for smaller businesses on how to come up well in search. It is not a very recent interview, but all of the advice is still highly relevant

The Google/ SEO category of Matt’s blog is also very useful.

A summary of some of the points that Matt made in the interview:

* Newer versions of WordPress, an open source content management platform, provides features for search optimisation
* Think about what different terms people are likely to use in searching for a business like yours, and use all of those in your
* Provide valuable information and resources such as tutorials
* Put time into learning about search engine optimization – use the many free online resources available to work out what you can do better
* In presenting search results Google tries to work out whether people are searching for a particular business or a company in an area – putting your address on your website helps Google to present you effectively
* If you post a video it is very useful to provide a transcript and meta-tags as search engines will be able to index it far better
* Search engines are not good at getting information from Flash, so provide navigation in HTML

Tags: google, Search, small business, sme
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Sydney

1 December 2009

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