Just about every website owner wants to get more traffic to their site. You might hire a SEO company to “optimize” your site or you might spend money on advertising, whether its pay-per-click (PPC) or other mediums. Like many others, I routinely look at my Google Analytics to see how these things affect my traffic, hoping for that upward trend line that lets me feel like my website is doing something for my business (umm, especially since my business is web design).

Business Contact Manager for Outlook is a lightweight CRM application that lets you manage customers, accounts, projects, opportunities, and marketing campaigns. By deploying the BCM database on a server your entire team can have access critical data. This screencast will show you how to perform the installation.

Here is a presentation I came across on SlideShare that discusses the basics of customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

This is the last installment in a series about business process and how it can help small companies regain control of their business. Simple and repeatable processes help to improve quality as they get refined and increase efficiency.

As I was writing the last blog post, I found that it was nothing more than a screen shot with a lot of product pictures about how this could implemented in the real world.  I really didn't think it added any real value to understanding so I decided not to continue on.

Instead, I want to summarize with a few tips:

1. Your process does not need to get in the way of your daily activities. It is there to serve you, so keep it realistic
2. Consider who, what, where and when while creating your workflow and make the tasks role based, not person based so new people can be dropped in with minimal impact to your operation
3. Document it
4. Refine it

Best wishes!

This is the third installment in a series about business process and how it can help small companies regain control of their business. Simple and repeatable processes help to improve quality as they get refined and increase efficiency. It can also minimize frustration that your customers may feel when errors or issues start cropping up.

This is the second installment of a series about taking control of your business. Take Control (Part 1) served as an overview of how the act of formalizing simple processes can put one on the road to increased efficiency, transition times, and quality. This post will discuss our fictitious web design company, called WD Co and their organizational structure.

WD is actually a micro business, having only two employees (partners): Jack and Jill. Jill is the real talent behind the company and the primary business driver. She meets with clients and performs the design work while Jack is primarily focused on running the actual operation. Both have some administration skills and are therefore able to share part of the customer facing work.

I was fixing a Joomla installation for a client who was using the UPS module in Virtuemart when I noticed that certain items were showing up as having valid shipping options but at a $0 cost. Obviously this was not correct so I dug into the /administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/shipping/ups.php code.

Most new business owners are overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done: sales, service, support, book keeping, operations, etc. So how can the small guy keep up with all of franchises or big league players? Do what they do!