SOCIAL NETWORKING, THINK LIKE A CANDIDATE

We are now in the immediate world where you can facebook, twitter or blog anything about your life and keep your friends and family up on what you’re doing. Along with this great way to communicate more than ever is the need to be conscience of your image. You might say “my facebook friends are the only ones who see my party pictures.” Not so, it is everyone in your friend’s network can see them too and it moves outward to people you may not be thinking about. In effect your social networking is a form of broadcasting and just like when you see a political candidate being careful of what they say because the wrong thing is guaranteed to be used against them in a story. On a smaller scale your social network entries can be telling a lot people about you and your image. Today you may be enjoying life and relaxing with friends but next year you may be running for office or looking to get that great job that is perfect for you. You want to make sure no one can go onto your social networking sites and see anything that would make them doubt you are the best person for the job. In the case of going the political route, it’s a certainty the other team is going to try to find anything they can use in their advertising to make voters think you may not be the best choice. Imagine having those St. Patrick’s Day photos come out with the neon hat and the beer bong. Guard what you put out there and craft your message. Use your social networking to get the word out about your community service, the wonderful new book you are writing or how you won that award at work. Want a good example of what happens when the wrong story gets out there, remember Michael Phelps, he has won more gold medals than any swimmer, broken world records and he lost a multimillion dollar sponsor because someone got inappropriate picture of him at a party. You are your own best advertising and you never know who is reading.

Having Technical Difficulties, you are not alone

The holidays are coming and a whole new season of gadgets. Of course that means hard to follow instructions, difficult help desk support and just general frustration. You may be interested to know you are not alone in your technical difficulties. Just in from a recent survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project,³ nearly half (48%) of adults who use the Internet or have a cell phone say they usually need someone else to set up a new device up for them or show them how to use it. And many users of various devices and services encounter breakdowns from time to time. Specifically:

• 44% of those with home Internet access say their connection failed to work properly for them at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 39% of those with desktop or laptop computers have had their machines not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 29% of cell phone users say their device failed to work properly at some time in the previous year.
• 26% of those with Blackberries, Palm Pilots or other personal digital assistants say they have encountered a problem with their device at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 15% of those with an iPod or MP3 player say their devices have not worked properly at some time in the prior year.

5 Great Reasons to hire a consulting firm rather than an employee

Helping Your Business is Our Only Priority

Employees can have many priorities and they may not be all about helping your business grow and be more efficient. A consulting firm can give you measurable results and we get paid when we get the job done for you. We work with owners and management, define the plan, implement it and report on results.

All of our hours are productive

Employees may not be productive throughout the day while a consulting firm is accountable for all hours devoted to your business. In today’s economy you may face the need to downsize to remain competitive and with employees that means layoffs or finding a way to trim the staff. This is often difficult and expensive leaving your business open to HR related problems. A consulting firm is hired to get your projects done, work with your budget and business priorities. You will never have to pay sick time, vacation or employment to At Your Service.

No Benefit Expense

If you have full-time employees more than likely you are incurring payroll expense and rising health insurance costs. With a consulting firm you are paying for hours devoted to your business without the overhead.

Fully Trained

Training expense is a tough hurdle for most businesses especially when there is no guarantee the employee will work out. At Your Service brings 25 years of corporate expertise in marketing, sales and IT. It’s our job to know your business and bring the correct resources to get the tasks completed.

Fully Flexible

Employees may be good at certain tasks and when business priorities change it may be difficult to re-task your employees. They may simply not have the skills to move to the new project or quit when they feel pressured to learn a new area of your business. A consulting firm is ready to take on whatever tasks you need and has the resources to get multiple projects done without the need to find new employees

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR ACCOUNTS ARE?

You are in business, you have clients, people are calling so you may say, and I have it knocked. Without an account management plan you could be losing out on a lot of potential revenue. Most businesses models are reactive. You spend money on marketing, people call; you take their order and deliver the product. Then the customer contact ends until the next time they need your product or service. Imagine if you knew who your customer does business with, what time of the year they buy products and from where, what are your customer’s target markets, marketing plans and growth plans. That would make it easy to see how your products and services fit into those plans and you could make proactive recommendations as opposed to taking orders. Now you are helping your customer’s take out the headaches of their buying decisions and making them very loyal to your company in the process because you have taken the time out to get to know them and their needs. When it is time to ask for referrals, your customers are going to rave about your customer service all because you had a proactive account management plan in place. Don’t know where to start, I can help you with all facets of learning your business and working with your accounts developing an organized proactive profile on your customers so you will be calling them to remind them about their next big order and no longer waiting by the phone for them. As always consultations are free and you can take the next step to more revenue, have no employee headaches and have more fun with your business this summer.

Are You Optimized?

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Why is it important to have an optimized website?

90% of all Internet users, use a search engine to find a particular website.

If the major search engines such as GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN, ASK. Can’t see your site the user is probably going to a competitor.

The average cost of acquiring a new customer via search engine optimization is about 35 cents compared to $1.00 per new customer for yellow page directories

A Website is not like putting an ad in the yellow pages. You can’t just “put it up and forget it.” Frequent keyword analysis and site submissions are required to get and stay listed with search engines. By monthly monitoring of the site insures continued high visibility.

Search engines often change the way they rank sites. When they do we reanalyze the site and resubmit it the search engines to maintain your high rankings

Your business is competitive and your marketing program needs to be the same way. To stay one up on the competition requires monthly monitoring of your competitors and insuring your site is better optimized every month.

Why are “Authority Links” important?

Search engines favor particular websites in every industry and by having them link to your site insure high rankings in search engines.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A PROPERLY OPTIMIZED SITE FROM US

Page ranking reports, where does your site currently rank and where does it rank after optimization

Competition analysis and your site optimized with the keywords used to find the most ranked sites in your industry

Indexing reports and insuring all pages are properly indexed with the search engines

Monthly monitoring of changes in the way search engines look for sites

YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR YOUR RANKING WITH THE SEARCH ENGINES

Proper optimization brings “organic” traffic to your website by naturally ranking it highly with the search engines and having the proper keywords web users are using to find you.

PRICING

Basic search engine marketing package, 1 time

$400 includes complete analysis, keywords maximized for your industry, competition analysis and what they are doing to rank highly, authority link analysis and linkage to those highly favored sites within your industry, ranking report before and after optimization, indexing optimization of all pages in your website

Quarterly SEO package

$1000 includes everything in the basic package plus quarterly optimization for 1 year with quarterly ranking reports and keyword analysis

Continuous monthly monitoring and optimization for 1 year

$1,200 one year monthly SEO package includes everything in the basic package plus on going monthly optimization for 1 year with monthly ranking reports and keyword analysis

How to make your small business look like a big business

You have probably heard a lot about VoIP and maybe think its just something to make cheap phone calls with or really don't understand anything about it, you are not alone. VoIP is voice over Internet protocol and can give a small business all the tools available to a fortune 500 company.

One of the biggest issues facing small business owners and solo entrepreneurs is not being able to afford large staffs to answer calls and insure the valuable sales leads are being followed up on. With VoIP one or two people can give the appearance of a company much larger. How so, you may ask?

The first key is the auto attendant. This can give a prospective client a very polished feel for your business. And it goes something like this. Thank you for calling ABC widgets and for sales please press 1., for more information on our fabulous product line press 2., to reach Tom the Widget master press 3 and shipping press 4. The client doesn't need to know Tom is sales, widget master and shipping. VoIP will insure Tom gets the call.

Find me follow me. The system can be set to ring Tom's desk phone, home phone and cell phone either simultaneously or in sequence to get the call.

Unified messaging. If the client leaves Tom a voice mail it will be converted to a Wav. voice file and sent as a e-mail retrievable on any Internet connection.

Soft phones. This is telephone software that can be loaded on to a laptop and connected via a headset and you can make and receive calls anywhere and to clients you are busy at your desk and not enjoying that much needed Bahamas vacation.

Just about all businesses I speak with are very concerned about how much this type of technology costs. Most people have had the local business phone person over and are still recovering from sticker shock after finding out all these features are $2,000 software add-ons or not an option on what still can be a $6,000 system for a small office.

Hosted or Hardware based VoIP presents great solutions than biting the bullet on a traditional phone system. Hosted VoIP comes from a phone carrier and for a monthly recurring charge you get the phones, unlimited calling and a high bandwidth Internet connection. The downside to some is you never own the system, but you are also not stuck with it either.

Hardware VoIP is very affordable, it is based in a computer such as a Dell and the machine and the software typically is around $2,000 plus the IP phones are about $150 a piece. The cool thing about it is you can plug your current telephone lines into the back of the computer along with your Internet connection and take advantage of all the VoIP features.

Reliability: I am sure you have heard or experienced some of the issues surrounding VoIP. Whether it is a hosted or hardware based solution, the key is the network and how the technology handles echos, latency and most importantly how it completes the call to the public switched telephone networks otherwise known affectionately as "Ma Bell."

Don't let companies fool you by saying you can avoid the telephone company all together. Quite simply you can't because in order to do that everyone you talk to would have to their own telephone switch.

Do you want to learn more? Post your question, I am sure you are not alone in wanting to know more about this stuff and I will be happy to answer.

Welcome to my blog

Hi Everyone, welcome to my blog. It is here where At Your Service Consulting will comment on trends in business and post your comments. I look forward to a lively forum.