A small business has little or no capital to spare, which translates into an ongoing struggle of meeting ends by cutting down as many costs as possible. Sometimes you end up handling accounts, sales, customer service, and operations all by yourself; and sometimes you even do the actual job if your employees are busy with another project and there’s a deadline you can’t skip. In the midst of this struggle, imagine that one of your computers breaks down.
Author: Kushal Sharma
Solid State Drives — The Future of Data Storage
While many people who are quite comfortable using a computer may have heard the term “Solid State Drive,” (SSD) few of them realize what they really are. In fact, many computer-literate people don’t know that hard disk drives actually have moving parts. It is only when you tell them that an SSD doesn’t have any moving parts, they come back with a question, “how’s that any different from a regular hard drive?”
Maximize Your Revenue With These Brilliant Alternatives to Google AdSense
Ever heard of the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? That principle applies to a number of things related to a small business or a blog be it marketing, revenue channels, or even something as simple as monetizing your website. And what’s more synonymous with website monetizing than Google AdSense?
Things OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice could learn from Microsoft
OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are two of my favorite open source office suites, and LibreOffice is quickly becoming an even bigger favorite. They have managed to do an incredible amount of work within a very short span of time, and launching a 3.3 version even before the OpenOffice.org community could do so only means that these guys are serious about their dream of a vendor-neutral and independent office platform.
Certify Yourself for a Great Career
In today’s competitive world, a lot of things depend on how highly people think about your skill levels. You may have worked in a field for a number of years, however, the charm a certification holds over potential clients or employers is an entirely different phenomenon. To be fair, it does seem to provide a baseline against which people can measure your skills.
Five Must-Have Collaboration Tools for Freelancers and Small Businesses
Gone are the days when you needed your own server for collaborative work between colleagues. Today, it’s possible to create an entire business on subscription plans and free collaboration tools that help you do everything you need with minimal effort and maximum reliability. This has already led to the creation of virtual offices all over the world – the open source ecosystem being one of the biggest and most successful examples of this. That shows that it’s finally possible to do away with expensive rental plans for offices and thousands of dollars for setting up and maintaining even a small-sized infrastructure.
Invoicing Should be Easy — and With These Apps, It Will Be
I always remind my colleagues of one rule that has served me very well through the years: “if it ain’t automated or delegated, it ain’t right.” Of course, not everything in life can be that way, but all the non-core activities of your business should be judged by this criteria as strictly as possible. That’s the only way you’ll ever find enough time to actually do your main job and even think about strategies of expanding it.
Marketing Your Website Beyond Social Media
The first thing most businesses do today is create profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and several other websites to start promoting themselves and you can’t really blame them either. For one thing it is free, and it is also the buzzword in town these days. However, what any businessman should remember is that we’re still in the age where old school marketing works — and works well!
RAID for Small Business
Last week, the website manager at Tech King, Andy Crofford and I were discussing about technology that could help self-employed professionals or owners of small businesses — in case you haven’t noticed it before, that’s usually what my blog posts are about — and the topic of RAID came up.
Backup and Recovery Software that will Save Your Valuable Data
Loss of data is every business owner’s worst nightmare. Of course, we all have our own little flash drives, external hard disks, and online accounts on which we keep copies of our most sensitive data or important documents that we need all the time. However, when it comes to a full-fledged business with a lot of data generated by users — or when it comes to a very large amount of data on your computer — you need to go a little beyond creating restore points and copying folders to an external storage device.
WordPress Themes for Everyone!
WordPress has come a long way from being just a tool for bloggers to a full-fledged CMS capable of doing almost anything. Note that I say “almost,” because there are still a few things that it can’t handle out-of-the-box or even via plugins.
Having said that, it is a perfect platform for most people; and if your website is based purely on content or even has a simple store where all you need to do is sell some products or digital items, you shouldn’t even be looking any further than WordPress.
What to Consider When Going Mobile With Your Web Site
Just like any other businessman, I too have this strong desire to empower users to sign up for and buy my services any time they want, using any device that can connect to the Internet. However things such as budgeting, potential for revenue, and the type of business you have are the kind of annoying “practical” realities that always come in the way.
Computer Programming Skills That Will Put You in Demand
A few days ago, the guys over at LangPop.com did a survey on the most popular programming languages based on the number of pages on which each was mentioned. Of course, as they admit it too, it is a fairly crude method; nonetheless, it is interesting to see which language has the highest footprint — so to speak — on the Internet.
Freelance Your Way to the Top with these Tools
It’s no secret that small businesses make up a major part of any developed country’s economy — including that of the US despite the fact that it has some of the biggest big-business giants in the world. And the good news for all these great guys is that with the advancement of IT (Information Technology), it’s getting ever more easy to manage their businesses.
Create a Killer Document Template in OpenOffice
As you probably already know from my article on Windows vs Linux, I’m a Linux guy. I simply love the kind of things I can do on my Linux box using all free and open applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, GnuCash, Rhythmbox, and most importantly, OpenOffice.org .