It's Hurricane Season: Back up Your Programs & Data
Wind damage, flooding, or tornados could leave you without your computers, your software programs and data.  Be sure to have three things prepared for such an emergency:  

• A CD-RW back up of your programs 
• A windows startup disk
• Current data back-ups

Keep these items at a separate location from your business and update them regularly.  It could save you thousands of dollars.  Contact your local computer tech to assist in a back-up if you do not have a CD-RW device.

For more info on backing up:
http://smallbiz.symantec.com/sym45.cfm?JID=1&PID=9656

Target Market: Online Buyers Show Age 
Retirees buying online have doubled since 1995. Three quarters (77%) of online buyers are currently employed. However employment among online buyers has declined over the years as older (and therefore retired) consumers come online.

A strong majority of people who have made their first online purchase prior to 1995 (85%) are employed today. In contrast, only 63% of those who first bought online in the past year are employed. Part of this is due to the incidence of retirees among online buyers which has nearly doubled from 9% of those buying online more than four years ago to 16% of those who bought only recently. Source: ActivMedia

Use Your Signature File with Email
A signature file is a short (usually six lines or so) message automatically placed at the end of every email you send. Most mail accounts support signature files. They automatically let you advertise your business without effort or thought. Or, you could put a short philosophic statement. In any case don't underestimate the power of this tool. Spend your time composing something that is intriguing and that will elicit a response from your reader. When you include a hot link to your email, autoresponder, or URL in you signature file, the reader will be able to follow up if interested.

Do you still use floppies as back ups for documents, email addresses, etc.? 
Use two.  Use each one every other time in case one of the floppies fails.

What information should you have ready before you call for tech support? 

• your type of operating system
• your machine type or model number
• your installed options and order of installation
• your BIOS
• any error codes which are numbers that appear on the blank screen
• information regarding recent downloads or installations

Have your information ready, take a deep breath and call tech support! 

Have you ever sent an important text document by email only to have the recipient tell you they cannot open it?

Try sending it in rich text format (rtx). Mac users, pc users and various word processing programs can communicate with each other in rich text format.  

How To: When you save your document, the save as dialog box has a save as type drop down box. Choose the rich text format option. 

Ask clients how they'd prefer to get in touch and you'll be shocked by how effective you'll be using the communication method they prefer.

Is your company attracting weak staff members? Not that many great employees will put up with a mercurial
or childish/immature entrepreneur. If you're attracting weak people, you'll need to mature as a human being. 

What if you gave a party and no one came?
                What if you had a Website and no one came?

Don't let it happen to you. Get yourself ranked with search engines, linked to other portal sites, and have your visitors return again and again.

Contact me. I will make it so.

252.249.0760       Toll-free:877.274.5685 
      E-mail