The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘CD Musings’ Category

Theclickdepot.com is a growing online marketing firm. And as much as it’s a whole bunch of fun growing an online marketing company, it also has its fair share of challenges. One of them is to keep things organized! Online marketing is a large field. We often deal with customers from markets as varied as limousine rentals to jewelry manufacturers to large public corporations - all looking for the same thing. The coveted attention of their target online community. But with variety comes complexity. We deal with tasks ranging from SEO strategy consulting, pay per click campaign management, Google Adwords, Link Building, Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Etc. We deal with several vendors and internal staff. All this can often get pretty challenging to manage, especially since there is no real way to know what orders we are going to get next month!
Given all that, it’s truly important for us and any business really, to keep tasks managed well. There are several ways that we’ve run into over time and we want to share our experiences about them here.

1. Outlook: This is probably the most popular task management approach.

Pros - If you and all your staff have Outlook already, then this is great way to manage tasks.

Cons -

This is good only to manage tasks with internal staff. It’s hard to do this with vendors even though its not impossible. Online task management is the easier way to manage vendor tasks and freelancer/consultants.

Outlook is expensive!

Outlook is not online. So if you are traveling or on the road, you can’t look at your tasks unless you have an exchange server or access to one and your mobile phone is synced from your exchange server. We don’t have that internally and most small businesses that we know don’t.

2. HiTask

This is my favorite. Check them out at hitask.com - online task management.

Pros - One of the best implementations of Ajax that I’ve seen out there. ULTRA easy to use. You can assign tasks to your team with drag and drop features on the website itself.

Cons - Costs money and is subscription based. If you have more than 2 people that want to look at each others’ tasks, then you really have to get the Business account to make it meaningful and that costs $15/month or $90/year. Yet, its worth the money in my opinion. I’ve tried this for over a month and I love it! I haven’t signed up for the business version yet because I am still testing out other services.

3. Task2Gather.com

This one looks similar to Hitask but free. My experience is that free tools like that just don’t cut it. You do get what you pay for and that’s why I am a bit worried whether this will compare with hitask as far as ease of use, functionality and support is concerned. But I am going to give it a try anyway.

Conclusion: Give online task management a try if you are working with multiple staff/vendors/freelancers, etc. and struggling to stay on top of their tasks. Hitask is our favorite so far and you can sign up for their business account for $90/year.
FYI - we are not affiliated with hitask in any way and no, they or anyone else are not paying us to write this post :).

Image Courtesy Of http://www.videinfra.com/hitask

Backups are necessary. We just talked about that in the previous post. I talked about Aronis True Image. Acronis is great to get a backup of your computer - incluging the OS, files, applications, Etc. OK, but where do you put your backups? Most people backup to an external hard drive or DVD’s that are stored right in the shelf next to the computer. While that might be OK in 99% of the cases, there is always that unfortunate chance that your entire office or home gets in the path of a hurricane, flood or forest fire. Now we sincerely hope that no such thing happens to you, but you’ll sleep better knowing that your most imporant personal and business data is protected in such a situation. Keeping your backups off-site is the way to go. Sooner done the better.

Cost for off-site backups used to be high in the past. Most often you’d need a dedicated server and end up costing thousands of dollards annually. Now that’s a thing of the past. Welcome to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a web-service based offering by Amazon. Amazon has a tremendously powerful website as you know at Amazon.com. It gets more traffic than all websites in Raleigh put together perhaps and more complex features than most websites on the Internet and millions of vendors selling their products on their website. A fully automated product management and inventory management capability and the ability to provide guarantees on price, shipping, delivery and a solid feedback mechanism. To run all that is no simple task. They have thousands of servers in state-of-the-art data centers and configurations that few people in the world can image. Such capability meant that they are experts in not just selling online but also on IT infrastructure. They are also experts on webservices and one of the first to bring serious ones to the market that allow other people to create stores using amazon products for an affiliate commission.

As a smart company, they decided to put those 2 fields of expertise to use - web service and IT infrastructire. And that gave birth to Amazon S3 and we’re sure you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. In essence it’s a service that makes it easy to trasfer your files from your PC or your website to Amazon via a high-bandwidth connection (which is a BIG deal, because uploads over the internet are generally slow, which makes it difficult to upload a large amount to data off-site on a regular basis). And the best part is that it’s cheap. At about 20 cents per GB of storage, it’s really cheap for the kind of protection that Amazon offers. No wonder many are using it already since the launch in 2006.

Several companies such as Seco backup and EzS3 have tools available that make it easy to use Amazon’s service. This is a handy list of amazon s3 tools. Jungle Disk and Backup Manager are perhaps the leading ones in the PC and Mac home backup market.

Another benefit of Amazon S3 is saving storage space. I used to have tons of unused storage space at home. Hard disks, DVD’s, zip drives that are hardly used, etc. Each of them would have some backup that I did at some point and I didn’t want to risk deleting them so they kept taking up space. Another problem with website backups is that once your website becomes slightly larger (500 MB - 1 GB storage or more), downloading the website’s files on a regular basis for backup takes forever and breaks all the time due to network issues. Having automatic backups with Amazon S3 takes care of both of those issues for the most part.

Give it a serious thought. You set it up once and forget. Worth the money and highly recommended!

Every single document that talks about any changes to anything mentions a backup. Most applications will ask you to backup something - either previous data, registry, etc. Most web software will ask you to create a backup of your files and database before installing or trying something new. How many times have you reformatted and installed OS on your machine in the last 2 years? More than 2? Then you need to read on!

We hear it all the time but do you really do all that? I don’t :). I am installing something almost every day. There is no time to keep backing up all the time. And most times I get lucky so I guess I don’t feel that fearful about the risk of losing things. But yet, I know that’s only a matter of time that I face my first major disaster and lose imporatnt personal or business information. In today’s regulated environments, losing customer data can actually even make you liable to lawsuits.So, I guess the point I am trying to make is that we need to backup. OK, roger that.

But how? Windows and Linux OS come with some utilities for backup, but most people don’t use it. If you’ve tried in the past, there are serious limitations. The biggest one - you have to do it manually! At least if you aren’t a geek that can write batch or shell scripts, that’s the only option to schedule the backup utils that the OS provides. Five years ago, there really weren’t that many good backup programs out there. Norton Ghost (Symantec Ghost then) was one of the few and the process of making a backup and restore work was a nightmare. Bootable floppies, scary-looking interfaces, command line arguments blah blah..

Things have changed. Welcome to programs like Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost 14 and Casper. These programs can make an “image” or a full backup of your hard disk for you. And they are super easy to work with. I am a fan of Acronis. Just not their support teams. But the software is brilliant. Works like a charm. You set up once and forget. It backs up to an external hard drive, DVD’s or to your online storage space.

Another option for online storage these days is the Amazon S3 backups. I will write another post in the future about that.

Marketing for small business often means working with a print company to print some coupons, fliers, postcards, brochures and sending it out to a million people. Of course, you have a website that does nothing for you other than help people find directions to your shop front once in a while. You think most people want to call you anyway so you are OK with that. Well, things have changed.

Small business is not really that easy anymore. Especially in recessions, there are large number of startups from people that have lost their jobs. You need to get creative with your marketing ideas to be able to survive and thrive. And the best part, it’s a LOT of fun. It’s like playing a game of Age of Empires - you plan and implement strategies and gauge results - which means more money! OK, I got a little carried away there - Age of Empires is not as much fun as creative marketing is

So what is creative marketing? Well, it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ten years ago, having a website that was used effectively was creative marketing. Today, that’s a necessity. Creative marketing today is finding ways to reach your clients that few people in your market are doing. Here are some examples:

1. Search Engine Optimization is one such way, which is actually fast becoming  necessity. You optimize your websites for certain key phrases. Create specific content on your site that is targeted at new key phrases that are emerging in your market space. This helps you create new market share on an active ongoing basis.

2. Dynamic businesses thrive in today’s market. Frequent change is liked by customers and they think of you more often that way. You also reach a broader audience since different offers may fly with different people. A new coupon or offer every week on your website or print newsletter.

3. Give stuff away that’s useful in your target market. Easiest way to make inroads in a market that has many players already. Make it fun too. For instance, if you have website, use your developer’s help to create a sweepstakes giveaway that includes  a slot machine. Visitors click on the slots and if they win, they get something from your products or services free. To play, they enter their email - now you can market to them after they leave. Email marketing is not creative marketing anymore - it’s a must. But finding creative ways to get your leads’ email in a safe, non-intrusive manner is where the creativity comes in.

If this sounds like too much work for you, talk to us. We can work out a creative marketing package for you and help you stand out!

One of the things that always irks me is that people don’t view small businesses as serious businesses that put strategic thought into this business plans. That’s so not true. Whether you are a multi-billion dollar company or a company with three employees (or even one for that matter), you need to think about how to grow your business and offer services of value that will help you stand out from competition.

Over the last few weeks, it’s amazing how negative the whole market has been. There is more talk about recession than about getting out of it. The fact that you have a business and are reading this post means that you’ve had the courage to take risk to be on your own. You obviously understand that rational positive attitude (not blind faith or arrogant over-confidence) is ultra important for the success of any business. Times such as now are especially a great time to remember that, not only because it’s the only business your busines will survive, because it can actually be your weapon to capture market share. Let me explain how.

Most people that I talk to are hesitant to make changes at this time. That attitude seems to be - “Hey the market is bad. I am lucky that I still have a job, even though it sucks and I had to take a 10% pay cut or bonus cut”. Or “I am not going to invest into this new idea. I don’t think people are buying at this time”. So WRONG.

People are still buying. Recession only means that instead of the GDP growing at +3%, it’s growing at say +1% or may be during real depressions, -2% or so. So, remember, the overall impact is only about +-5% - that’s not enough to go all negative. Online marketing activity and sales actually GREW this holiday season significantly compared to 2007. Think about it this way - If your company revenue dropped 5% a specific month, would you get all worked up about it and decide not to implement new ideas. Instead, you’d actually work harder to try and actually change things so that they improve, right? How is a recessionary time any different.

Most people fail to realize that simple argument. You can take advantage of that.

1. Market your product on the Internet and find newer creative ways to capture the market.

This is an easy way to get new leads on an ongoing basis for a small investment. A great way to capture market during recession.

2. Improve your product or service so that you stand out from competition.

Most people stay away from this during recession. This is your opportunity to stand out.

Overall recession can be your time to be prosperous and grow!