Most (if not all) small businesses are concerned with operating costs and cash flow, especially when they are in the start-up stages. In this article you will learn how you can handle business with less than $100 per month while all your business activities are humming at the right speed.

I chose to stay away from the obvious and instead give you the resources you might not have heard about, while others might be obvious but not quite known at this time. I have divided the must-have business activities in 3 major sections:

1. Communications
2. Sales
3. Finances

1. COMMUNICATION

This activity is vital to any business and without the right tools you might as well forget about starting anything, let alone a thriving new endeavor. Modern communication spawns across several fields:

• Telephone (voice mail)
• Messaging
• Faxing
• Online Meetings
• Email

With all the phone candy on the market most of these functions can be covered by any simple phone offered by a reliable network. Stick with Verizon or AT&T and you should have no problems with a 3 bar coverage signal in most of continental US.

In order to make yourself available to your clients, you are probably indicating your mobile phone as your primary business phone number. That’s fine and dandy but what happens if your client is outside your ‘realm” and need to speak with them on your “off-peak” hours? That $100 per month will look more like $1000 per month and the whole essence of this article would be lost.

That is why you need the all mighty Google again. Google, in case you didn’t know, is in phone business and if you are a small business, most of the stuff offered by them is FREE. Well, if it’s free – it’s for me!

Go to www.google.com/voice and check out the virtual number you can get and unify all your phone numbers into one. It’s a good read and will help you select the right central number you can now give away to your clients. Just don’t complain when they will be able to reach you from Hong Kong at 3:00 AM your time.

One thing a phone would not do is faxing; unless Steve Jobs is currently thinking of equipping the new iPhone with a thin roll of paper, this function is still bias to the existence of a fax machine or a PC/MAC on your desk.

There are however services that can eliminate the clunky fax machines off your desk and save some space for a cool new color printer, which can be connected to your computer and thus print any fax you might receive (and you really, really need to print it). Once such service is called Fax It Nice (www.faxitnice.com). The cool part about this service is the flexibility in plans and its simplicity as a program. You can virtually fax anything anywhere without really being at your computer because it does not require any software to download. Their pay as you go program puts the “nice” in the Fax It Nice.

Next runner up – eFax (www.efax.com). Still a good service and easy to understand software but a bit pricey compared to Fax it Nice. Give it a shot and see which one you like the best.

Online meetings

Yes – sometimes you really need these and if you want to appear as a well established business you better know how to handle this function. During these online sessions, you can share files, video, audio and even screen shots off your computer.

It’s a great tool to have access, especially if you have a lot of demos or portfolios you want to share with your audience. If that’s your need, head over to the nice people from Vyew (www.vyew.com) who offer this amazing tool for FREE.

Email

– there is one thing I need to add about this – you totally have to check out Google mail and I am not talking here about creating a Gmail account. That would look tacky to your clients, relying on free email accounts.

I am sure, by now you have considered and/or probably already purchased hosting for your website. Usually, that comes with free email accounts. Before you do anything, just migrate your domain to Google and get your personalized email on any computer or phone. [ Read this article to see how it is done ]. I use it and love it.

2. SALES

There is a sweeter alternative to carrying a Franklin planner with you to all the meetings – a CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) system that allows you to track your existing as well as perspective clients, meetings, dates, sales appointments, alarm you when some task or another is due, and the list goes on. You can have all this for around $24 per month by taking advantage of the services offered by 37 Signals on their website (www.highrisehq.com)

Similar types of software can be found at: Sugar CRM (www.sugarcrm.com) or Sales Force (www.salesforce.com).

3. FINANCES

You are probably keeping track of all your invoices, cash flow and bill payments using some sort of combination between and Excel Spreadsheet and QuickBooks. Well, the following is a nifty tool that gives you all that and more without breaking the piggy bank. I am referring to Less Accounting (www.lessaccounting.com) which could be your cup of tea is you are a business with small accounting needs. You will be amazed about its dashboard simplicity and easy reporting, so you know your financial situation at any time.
Others that come close to what Less Accounting can do are: Blink Sale (www.blinksale.com) and Fresh Books (www.freshbooks.com).

These are just some of the applications that are available on the web, so if you are using other ones and have great experience with them, please do share.

During my meetings with several clients I noticed the confusion some of the web jargon is creating when they try to read results for their websites. This article will explain in plain English what all these terms mean and hopefully clear the confusion.

Hits

“I get 100,000 hits a day” – you hear someone bragging about their website.

Translation: That means exactly nothing.

“Hit” means a file is being sent by the server hosting your website to the web browser whenever a web page is loaded. Here’s an example: If you have a web page with 10 images that was loaded in a browser by 1 visitor, your hit counter will show the number 11.

Why?

That is because the hit counter registers 10 hits for the images + 1 for the file itself where the images reside. Does this give you any indication of the traffic to your website? Not unless you keep track of all the web pages you have, all the images on each page and do the math for the entire site. That’s pretty confusing. All in all “hits” don’t mean too much or at the most don’t show accurately what’s going on with your site.

Page Views

This component it’s a bit more accurate than “hits” but still do not give you a clear picture of where your website stands. If your “Page Views” is equal to 10 that means 2 things:

1. 10 Visitors saw 1 web page or
2. 1 Visitor viewed 10 pages

That is still not giving you an accurate reading, especially if you are trying to obtain precise statistics on your website. The one element of web statistics (stats) that you really should pay attention to is:

Visitors

This will show you exactly how many people have visited your site. Based on this number you can definitely make assumptions and gear your web promoting efforts towards traffic – and that’s what matters the most.

If you are running any paid inclusions you should probably know about PPC.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

This is in fact the amount of money you pay a search engine every time someone clicks on your ad you had setup with them.

This is in a nut shell a simple way of explaining the elements you should look at whenever you check your stats for your website.

Disaster Recovery

Last spring I moved from Detroit to LA and after unpacking my computer I realized that my backup was totally damaged. Although I had one of these fancy Western Digital external hard drives with over 500 GB, it seems that they are not very sturdy.

During the drive from Michigan to California, the backup rattled loosely inside the trunk of my car and the disk was rendered useless. I cannot even describe the helpless feeling I had once I realized that all my work for the past 4 years was lost. Or so I thought…

I immediately contacted some local companies (by the way the Geeksquad was mostly useless and didn’t even bother to suggest where I could seek a more specialized help) after doing some online research. After several hundreds dollars and a couple of days of wishful thinking I was able to recover my data. After this incident I promised myself I will never risk something like that ever again.

After more time spent online, I found several solutions that gave me peace of mind and allowed me to sleep much better at night. First of all, here’s my setup (of course yours might be very different):

• I have 1 desktop and 2 laptops to backup.
• The desktop and one of the laptops are always connected to the web.
• I also have 3 websites and a blog I need to backup at least every other day.

All my hardware has the disks “split” in 3. On C drive I have a partition for the operating system. On D drive I have 2 large folders; 1 containing the files for all my clients and the other with all my work files. The third partition contains the backup of the second partition. I usually keep 10 backups at all times. This is usually about a month old. I delete the rest as I do the backups.

Once a month I create a CD with the backup and labeled with the month and the year.  I also discovered 2 great online solutions that will allow me to backup my web sites and blog files automatically on a separate location. They are:

• Amazon
• JungleDisk

For only pennies per day I have a perfect plan for when disaster strikes and I can recover my files with just a few clicks. I encourage you to develop such a plan and use the links I have suggested. You will thank me in the long run.