Tips to Save Money or Time with Technology in Small Business

If you are like me, you are continuously looking at the advances in new technology and wondering if you and your business can keep up with it. But what if you turned your thought process the other way around? What if, by using technology you actually saved money and time?

Here is a list of tips that may help out any small business owner to save money by using a small amount of technology

1. Recurring Expenses – look at your recurring list of monthly expenses. By upgrading to a yearly plan or paying for the full year in advance, can you save you some time and energy?

2. Your website – any business without a website is really a waste. But when small business first took on the whole idea of the website they also took on the high monthly fee for SEO and a big flashy template. Now that blogs and websites are meshing together it is not necessary to have just a website. If your traffic suggests, re direct your URL to a blog or another site where you have better traffic and less expense.

3. Your land line phone – do you really need a land line? If you said yes because I have a fax machine then your answer is wrong. You can get internet fax service for as little as $7 a month. On the flip side, a scanner is also considered legal for documents as well. If you can’t bear to give up your telephone then ditch some of the unnecessary things such as call waiting and call forwarding. The first time you put someone on call waiting is usually the last. That is what voicemail is for.

4. Your mobile phone – take a look at your bill and see where your money is actually going. Call your provider and have a conversation with them every quarter. Most companies won’t tell you they have a new special or a new package unless you call or visit in person and ask.

5. What are you paying for your anti virus program? – most expensive antivirus programs have fees to renew each year. Try using a free antivirus program like Avast. It may be missing the bells and whistles of the built in firewall and email spam filter, but most Windows programs now have these built in anyway.

6. Use Google – Google has all of these great free applications that are awesome for the small business. Google calendar, task Manager, alerts, real-time, desktop and analytics. If you can figure all of these out, they are free!

7. Never impulse buy technology – if you are like me, I get about 3 calls a week from some American firm wanting to sell me some sort of lovely real estate program that will make my life easier and give me thousands of leads that are ready to buy a home yesterday. Have them send you an information package and then do your own home work.

8. Ask for help – instead of spending hours on hold with tech support and getting people who may or may not be in India and use English as their second language, ask your friends of family for help. Do you want to set up a face book business page for yourself? Chances are the teenager down the street can do it in ten minutes, plus he will work for a gift card to Best Buy.

9. Don’t send out Refrigerator magnets - seriously, how many times do you go to the fridge to see the date? Even use an old fashioned calendar? Carrying a business card may become obsolete soon. Try different forms of marketing to get to your clients, and download bump on your I-phone. Then you can just bump phones and the information has been shared. How easy is that!