Small Business For Dummies by Eric Tyson

Author:Eric Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

If you’re looking for a resource that picks up where we leave off and delivers the best marketing advice available from a small-business perspective, we recommend Barbara Schenck’s Small Business Marketing For Dummies (Wiley).

Chapter 12

Tapping Technology

In This Chapter

Ramping up your business’s efficiency by using technology and the Internet

Researching business ideas and finance options online

Using the web to market your business

Most of the time, technology enables small-business owners to run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. Hence, we encourage you to keep a finger on the pulse of technology and its role in your type of business. In fact, if you fail to track and take advantage of useful technology, your business could end up getting thumped by your competition (for more on the needs of a growing business, head to Chapter 20). However, like any tool, technology can be misused or overused and become more costly than it has to be.

Using technology effectively can help you do many things for your business:

Save you and/or your employees time

Stimulate ideas that can help make your business grow larger and more profitable

Manage your personal and business finances (think online banking and accounting software)

Deliver advertising and marketing to targeted sectors

Never buy expensive new business hardware and software until you talk with several other small-business owners who’ve used the product for at least a year. Be sure to exercise self-discipline when you’re surfing the web to find small-business services or to identify software you may want to purchase. Computers and handheld time-management hardware, for instance, are incessantly sold as time and money savers, but anyone who has dealt with those products knows that they can also make things more difficult and stressful and can end up costing more than they save if you use them inefficiently.

Few websites offer useful information for the sake of offering information; more often, websites offer “free” small-business services and business news, business plan advice, and so on in order to keep you clicking through the site. The goal, of course, is to sell you something, not to educate you. Don’t get sucked into these time-wasting and money-burning sites.

Now that we’ve addressed the warnings, we can proceed with the good stuff — the ways in which you can use technology to better conduct your business and separate your company from the pack. This chapter contains our suggestions for the best ways to utilize technology in your small business, including our recommendations for software programs and websites.

Improving Your Business’s Efficiency

Technology costs money to buy and implement. So the simple promise of making your business more efficient isn’t enough of a reason to spend your hard-earned cash on technology. For you to buy a particular technology resource, the improvement offered by that resource must more than pay for the cost of buying it.

In this section, we discuss where we see you getting the best bang for your buck in terms of improving your business’s efficiency through technology.

Managing your time

In the early stages of your business, only one person can make or break your business.

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