Google Voice – the best free new service for small businesses!

Running a small business, i am always working! But i don’t always want to be tied to my office. So recently i have been searching for a service that can give me one phone number that can follow me wherever i am. I was looking at several companies who charge around $50/month for the services i want when i received an email from Google telling me that they had just launched Google Voice. Their service does everything i need and is FREE!

How it works:

When someone calls the phone number i received from Google, I chose to have it ring my office number and my cell phone at the same time! So, if i am in the office, i will answer the call on my land line (and not waste my minutes) and when i am out of the office, i can take the call on my cell. You can add any number of phone numbers to your account to ring at the same time (home, beach house, etc). If you have a set work schedule (unlike myself) you can even create a ring schedule so that a certain phone rings only on certain days or hours (so no business calls come through at 2 am and wake you up!)

Other great features:

*Google will transcribe a voicemail message for you and send it as a text message to your cell phone!

*You can also download a program to your Blackberry so that you can send Free SMS text messages and make low cost international phone calls right from your cell phone.

I highly recommend you get yourself signed up for Google Voice right away! www.google.com/voice.

Organize your Outlook email in box easily with this free program!

I’ve just installed this program called Neo. They have a free and a paid version of their software. What it does is interface with your outlook to give you many more ways to sort, file and search for emails. They have an online video tutorial to see how it works.

Check it out at http://www.emailorganizer.com/  

Virtual invitations (with style)

Do you send out virtual invitations for events? Not happy with the look of an evite.com invite? I just discovered this new website that has pretty stylish electronic invitations (and they are free!). Check out Pingg http://www.pingg.com

I have also found another great website called mypunchbowl.com http://www.mypunchbowl.com . I used them to create the invitation for my sister’s birthday and i thought the software was easy to use and was great way to manage the RSVPs!

Get money just for opening a bank account

Competition is fierce in the banking industry. So take advantage of this and get the best bargain possible! A great website that is keeping track of all the banking offers out there is http://bankbonuses.info/

If you like my advice, SUBSCRIBE TO MY BLOG!

Subscribing to a blog is easy. There are just two things you need to do.

1) Choose an RSS reader. In plain english, this means that you need to choose a way to read the new postings of the blogs to which you subscribe.  I use My Yahoo which i have set as my home page (my.yahoo.com) but you can also use iGoogle, or reader.google.com .

2) You need to subscribe to a blog. Firefox (the browser that everyone should use if they don’t already) has an easy way to subscribe to a blog you like. When you are on the blog’s site, there will be an orange icon in the right hand side of the address bar (it looks like orange radio waves). Click on the icon and it will ask you which RSS reader you would like to use to subscribe to the blog. You choose the one you want and VOILA, you’re subscribed.

Money Saving Tips for small businesses

Here is an easy way to make a little extra profits for your company if you have an online store (or just do a lot of shipping). First, unless you are a major player and have a VERY large shipping volume FEDEX is much less expensive than UPS. I’ve done many comparisons and Fedex is cheaper- and they are really fast at delivery!

Now, how do you make extra profits for your company by shipping via FEDEX? A few ways:

1) If you use QuickBbooks for your accounting, you can get a good discount with Fedex. Here is the press release. Call Fedex for the discount details (make sure to ask them if they have any other offers that are better than Quickbooks that you qualify for) http://web.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_releases/2002/09-18.html

2) Get an American Express card. I got a special offer that not only waives the annual fee but they actually gave me $250! Then, have all of your Fedex shipments charged to your AMEX. This will earn you an additional 5%. Here are the details-http://www.fedex.com/opensavings/

So, charge your customer the regular rate for Fedex and you will earn at least 5% on your shipping. It may not sound like much but every penny counts!

Microsoft Outlook Hack: This is a fun way to get you inspired if you run an online store

Ok, I decided last week that i needed a little inspiration to work on getting more orders from my online store so i set up this fun little hack.

Every time someone places an order on my website, i get an email. I decided to set up Outlook so that every time i get the order email, Outlook would not only put the email into a “orders” folder that i created but it would also make a sound- the sound of an old fashioned cash register- !$!KA-CHING!$! (hear it here- http://www.wavsource.com/snds_2007-10-19_30325516338194/sfx/cash_register2.wav .

Here’s how to set it up:

First, if you don’t have a separate folder for your online orders, you probably should. Right click on the “inbox” icon and select “new folder”. Name it whatever you would like. I chose to set it as “1online orders” so that it would appear at the top of my folder list.

Now, go to this online site and choose the sound file that you like best. I chose “cash register” as it represents the sound of my company being profitable and me being able to work for myself full-time YAY!.

Here is a good site for free .wav files. http://www.wavsource.com/sfx/sfx.htm You will need to download the .wav file of your choice (and remember where you saved it- “my music” is a good folder choice!)

Next, the order emails i receive all have the same text in the subject so i decided to create a rule using the rules wizard. Go to “tools” and then select “rules wizard”(IMPORTANT! if you already have multiple folders, make sure that you are in your “inbox” when you do these next steps).

With “start creating rule from a template selected” you want to choose “move messages based on content”. Hit “next” and then click on “specific words”. This will bring up a box for you to enter text. Write whatever the heading is for your order emails (if they differ slightly every time but have a few common words you can use those here). Then hit “next” again to go on to the next screen. When you see “what do you want to do with this message?” I chose 2 actions by making a check mark next to the items- “move it to the specified folder” and “play a sound”. You will notice that “specified folder” and “a sound” are blue and underlined. Click on each of them to specify the folder and the .wav file you want to use. The next screen asks you for exceptions to the rule- i had none but you might have some and if so add them here. Make sure at the end to “turn on the rule” and if all of your online orders are in your inbox, a quick way to get them all into your new “orders” folder is to check “run this rule on the inbox”.

Next time you get an online order you will hear the wonderful sound !$!KA-CHING!$!.

This Week: My favorite ways to get organized in the least amount of time

This week i will be writing posts about my favorite (and possibly little known ways) to get organized. Most of these posts will talk about being “electronically” organized- i’ll leave home/office organization to someone else as it is not my forte.

Here is my first (and favorite) shortcut for being organized- this is for people who use Microsoft Outlook for their email and Calendar.

Nowadays it it seems like every invitation whether it is business or social comes via email. Instead of retyping all of the information from an email invite onto an Outlook appointment on your calendar, there is a simple way to transfer the email to your calendar. Simply highlight the email and drag it onto the Calendar icon on the left-hand side of Outlook. This will automatically open up a new appointment and put the entire body of the email into the “notes” field. Now all you have to do is set the date, time and a reminder for yourself. The rest of the info on location and anything else is right at your fingertips any time you open the appointment on your calendar. AND the best part is that you can now delete the email (the info will remain in the notes of your appointment) which will unclutter your inbox.

Hopefully i just saved you enough time each day to take an extra 10 minutes on your coffee break!

Your hard earned money may not be as safe as you think in the bank!

A friend who runs a non-profit organization told me yesterday that the bank they use for their checking and savings account FAILED overnight! The bank is Netbank which is an online bank with over $2 billion in assets! My friend’s non-profit organization had over $450,000 on deposit with the bank! So far, they have only got the FDIC insured amount back and may not get the rest back for quite a long time (if ever!)

The lesson to remember here is that bank accounts (checking, savings, money markets) are only guaranteed for $100,000 in cash. Here is a link to the FDIC’s website for further information http://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/insuringdeposits/index.html .

 If you are also a customer of Netbank and are in the same situation, heed the above advice!

 

Hello world!

Welcome to my brand new blog AMY KNOWS! Friends are always calling me and asking advice on many topics such as business, finance and ecommerce so i thought i would put all that advice down in one spot for many people to use.

***BIG DISCLAIMER HERE*** I am not an EXPERT in any of the subjects that i will post about but i do a LOT of research on these topics for my own company and have learned a lot along the way.

Please feel free to use the comments section to add your own advice or comments to make this site even more informative.

XO

Amy