Calling All Business Owners: Tips on Your Phone Service that Will Save You Money

This is a guest post by Nicole Hayward, Marketing Director at Junction Networks.

If you are a start up or small business owner, odds are you’re going to need a business phone service. (You’re not going to tell prospective clients to call your cell phone much longer…) Here’s a tip that’s going to make your business look bigger, better, and smarter: Use a Hosted VoIP service.

What is Hosted VoIP?

Voice over IP (VoIP) is the growing technology that allows you to make phone calls over your internet connection. You may associate Skype with VoIP, which is an app that allows you to call another Skype user. However, there are phone services that integrate with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), allowing you to make and receive phone calls like you would on a traditional phone.

Because of its relatively new emergence to the market, a VoIP service may seen intimidating. But, I’m here to assure you it’s actually cost efficient, reliable, AND easy to set up!

Why is VoIP Great for Small Businesses?

First and foremost, VoIP is great for small businesses because of its cost efficiency and ease in setting up. Frankly, if you choose a hosted VoIP service, you won’t need to pay a phone company to wire a business phone at your office or home. Instead, you’ll sign up for the service, purchase an IP phone to plug into your internet connection, and you’re set. Also, the actual phone service is cheaper because long distance calls are essentially local calls; voice data travels over the internet until it reaches a local PSTN to transfer to the recipient.

Secondly, VoIP has great features and scalability. You will find, using a hosted VoIP service, that you can choose a package that fits your business needs and budget. “This technology allows for businesses to take advantage of services like auto attendants, conference bridges, voicemail servers, video conferencing, click-to-call website integration, business hours routing, and voicemail-to-email notifications…” says TechCrunch. In addition to these features, you will be able to:

• Add users (extensions) in a matter of a few clicks as your business grows
• Answer your phone from the road using a smart phone app or your laptop in your hotel room
• Transfer calls to your remote employees with extension dialing (available with some services like OnSIP)
• Take your phone system with you when you move to a new office.

How Do You Get Hosted VoIP?

Well, of course I am biased, since I work for a great Business VoIP Service, OnSIP. You can easily sign up and try our service. But, feel free to weigh your options by Googling “Business VoIP”. Remember if you choose Hosted VoIP, all you will need are IP phones (e.g. Cisco or Polycom) and a broadband connection. Or, you can always email me with questions. Good luck in growing your business and communications!

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Nicole Hayward is the Marketing Director at Junction Networks, the creators of OnSIP Business Phone Service. Joining the software development industry after a traditional engineering education, she became passionate about discovering new software tolls for business efficiency and success. Follow Nicole and the rest of her team on Twitter @OnSIP and on the OnSIP blog. Or, you can email her at Nicole [AT] JunctionNetworks [DOT] Com.

Blogging Schedules: It May Never be “Good Enough”, but that’s Okay

The blogosphere is made up of countless blogs on an exuberant amount of different topics. There is literally about 500 different blogs that appeal to every one person. That is how big the blogosphere is. While there are so, so many different things people bring up, explore, dissect and discuss on their blogs, when you cut through all the clever wording used to describe what a particular blog is all about what type of content you would expect to find there, there are mainly two different types of blogs–those used to detail, rant and rave about one’s life and blogs built and written by and for corporations. As more and more people start opening up and divulging just about everything that goes through their heads to their prospective audiences and as more corporations seek to identify and connect with their consumers, the line between these two, seemingly separate blog types continues to blur where we, the blog readers, see our favorite blogs writing about and being sponsored by corporations. Before the most recent FTC guidelines have been put into place, most of the time, blog readers did not know when we, bloggers, were just sharing information or were being compensated in some way for what we wrote about products and businesses.

As this already very thin line continues to blur, people who began blogging to divulge, rant, rave and detail their lives on the internet are evolving their blogs into their businesses and in some, albeit rare cases, a person’s blog makes up their entire of the bulk of their household income. While most people put the emphasis of being compensated for blog posts, advertisements and the like on mommybloggers, this trend has and will continue amongst any and all blogs with a significant audience that is deemed a “target audience” by consumers.

Woman Tribune started out as a business-like blog. It was not created merely to divulge about my life, although I have done just that on several occasions and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as Woman Tribune is up and running, but it was created more-so to provide information and to explore and discuss information that is important and significant in the lives of women everywhere. To put it bluntly, Woman Tribune was created as a business, rather than something fun to do in my down time and because of that, Woman Tribune has always operated with a business-like platform. One of the major things to keep in mind when creating a blog with the purpose of it being a business in mind is that it must always contain recent information. While I do my best to post about relevant, interesting and varied topics, if I let Woman Tribune sit for a few days with no content going up after a number of days, it is pretty much the equivalent of committing blogosphere suicide. It starts to become irrelevant, something easy to gloss over and it becomes forgettable. So obviously, knowing that not only is content king in the blogging world, but frequent content is also king and something that must be kept in mind to sustain your blogging/business, the thought of blogging schedules is guaranteed to come up in your mind at least, oh, about 150 times. A day.

Blogging schedules are tricky. Every “professional blogger” or “internet/blog marketer, “interblog marketer” if you will, repeatedly states in just about every five posts for about five years straight to post on your blog as many times as you’d like, but around the same time every day in order to set your readers on a schedule and give them something to look forward to. This is all well and good, in theory, but can become quite a mess in no time and without any effort.

Firstly, trying to get my readers on some sort of “schedule” of when to expect my new posts seems a little weird to me. A little like parenting and why would I start treating my readers like my children when most of them already have children of their own? To add to this, because most of my readers do have children of their own, that means that while they probably love, and even fantasize, about the thought of having some semblance of a schedule, in reality, that is really not given to most parents. Adding to that, for a blogger to be available at around the same, exact time every day in order to update their blog makes it sound like they are lacking a life, which then again may be why they make the money and can be considered interblog marketers in the first place. Just sayin’…

I have always been a night owl; there is just something about the dark and the quiet that really jump-starts my mojo and really puts me to work. I tip a significant hat to the night time as being a key factor in my web design/development talents and for putting my natural knack for the English language to work as a writer early. I have been on the internet, designing and developing websites, writing (mostly) bad poetry and blogging since I was 13 years old. That is an entire decade of this stuff and for the longest time, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and I built a name for myself in the political and feminist blogging worlds early. I thought I had some sort of an idea of what I was doing, but as I founded Woman Tribune and found myself enthralled with this new “blogging business” everyone jumped on the bandwagon of over the course of the past few years, I realized that in order to treat this business like a legitimate business, I was going to have to adapt to some business hours. This is exactly where my blogging schedule goes a bit haywire. Because I am a night owl, I am very often up all night (it’s 5:11am here right now and I have not yet been to bed. You obviously get the picture.) and because of this, I am usually not awake during “business hours,” ie: 9am to 5pm. A lot other bloggers have come out quite frequently to say that they too are night owls or suffer from insomnia and in order to still operate under the disguise, for lack of a better word, of being awake during normal business hours, they simply schedule their blog posts that they have written in advance, to publish throughout the day. I could do this if my WordPress did not consistently refuse to publish scheduled posts, therefore making me believe that my installation of WordPress has developed some sort of technological personality and I am just not ready for my content management system to start taking over my life, and then of course, the world.

Just a few days ago I had stayed up all night and got so, completely tired, but wanted to force myself to stay up all day and “work,” also known as write blog posts which is very much work in my life, this website technically being my business regardless of how much I enjoy doing it, but something dawned on me–something that should have dawned on me quite a while ago. I created Woman Tribune in order to provide information to women and to explore and open discussion about the topics that interest me, and collectively other women around the world. If I stay up all night and sleep all day, yet still provide this same service, then I have essentially fulfilled my obligation. If Woman Tribune has become even the least bit important, or a daily stop on women’s blog hopping and internet stays throughout the day, then it technically should not matter when new posts hit the home page.

When small potatoes bloggers, and yes I do very much consider myself small potatoes, I do not have an ego in the least when it comes to my “online personality,” see the blogs of corporations or really, really big potatoes bloggers updating several times a day it is because most of them have a staff of writers. Most of them have pre-written posts to publish throughout the day to make themselves look more professional, again for lack of a better word, than they really are. Bloggers who have created their own websites and who are the sole bloggers on their websites cannot catch up to the amount of volume being presented on professional and corporate-backed blogs and it is about time that we stop trying to. We don’t have teams or staff, we just have ourselves and if people are still logging onto our websites, then it must be enough and it must be okay.

Do you keep to a blogging schedule? Do you think having a blogging schedule or posting at the same time every day is important?

While I and Woman Tribune, essentially is a “small potatoes” blog, I am very interested in its continued expansion and if any women out there are interested in contributing guest posts or weekly/daily columns to Woman Tribune, please feel free to contact me directly at holly[at]womantribune[dot]com to contribute your awesome blogging talents. I’m sure we could work something out and you would be in pretty good company because for the most part, I kick ass. Again, just sayin’…

Hemorrhoid Treatment

It isn’t something that many people talk about or are comfortable talking about, but it happens. Considering the amount of women who are pregnant or who have experienced hemorrhoids while pregnant or those who have office jobs or who work at home on their computers for several hours a day, people frequently get hemorrhoids but not many people know the specific causes or ways to go about making sure that their bodies are in good health and treating it effectively.

While pregnant women and people who hold jobs that involve a lot of sitting do make up a great amount of people who get hemorrhoids, the number one cause is constipation and the number one cause of constipation is your diet. When it comes to your health, one thing directly affects another and so on and because of that, we really must start at the root of a problem. In this case, your diet is extremely important. It is best to eat foods that contain a good amount of fiber and if that isn’t possible, there are a great deal of different fiber supplements that are available and make it easier to have regular bowel movements. It is also very important to drink at least 6 glasses of water per day to keep you regular and in good health.

It is important not to wait to get this condition treated since they can become more and more painful over time and ultimately, if not treated, could result in surgery. There are several ways to go about treatment; because everyone’s body is a little different, it is important to do a little research and see what type and brand of hemorrhoids treatment is right for you.

Rated by hemorrhoid sufferers and professionals, the number one rated treatment for hemorrhoids is Venapro. Venapro is safe to use, works the fastest with a 97% success rate, is highly recommended by doctors and has no side-effects. Best of all, with Venapro you have the security of a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work for you. To find out more about the number one rated hemorrhoid treatment, just check out the Venapro reviews.

Applying for a Receptionist Job

Receptionist jobs are often underrated, as many of you know! Required to undertake a whole host of different tasks, often under a good deal of pressure, he or she needs to be able to maintain focus and control while being pulled in several different directions at once. And most important of all still be able to smile and present a calm, helpful demeanor to anyone who phones or enters the building.

The receptionist is the customer’s first impression of a company, and although receptionist jobs don’t require a university degree, you must be able to multi-task, answer the telephones, deal with inquiries, work with databases and staff, and facilitate the general day-to-day running of the company.

In this age of automated phone systems and electronic communication, people genuinely appreciate being able to speak to a human being. Because of this, receptionist jobs are being valued more, as they become a rarer commodity amongst the backdrop of out-sourced admin and automated responses.

Working in receptionist jobs is not suitable for everyone. Direct person-to-person contact is a skill that needs to be honed, so that the crucial first impression potential clients have of the company is favorable and positive. The receptionist should put people at ease and inspire confidence. He or she should give the impression the business runs smoothly and visitors are welcome. A detailed knowledge of the company and employees is essential, so inquiries and telephone calls can be channeled towards the right department without delay.

The great variety of tasks involved in receptionist jobs means the job is challenging without being greatly different each day. Receptionist need to be computer literate, have a good telephone manner, and be an accomplished communicator. Patience and forbearance are handy attributes when dealing with members of the public! Not all interactions are pleasant, and some may involve delicate, awkward, or even unpleasant communications.

People applying for receptionist jobs need to be aware that sometimes things can go wrong. In which case, the ability to handle complaints with politeness, in a level-headed and fair way, is essential. However these situations are rare, and by far the biggest reward of receptionist jobs is the ability to help people achieve their aim, and enjoy the recognition you receive from having done so.

Take On Your New Business with Updated Computer Software

Now, more than ever, people are making the decision to leave their 9-5 jobs and starting their own, home-based businesses. Most of the home businesses people are opting for are internet businesses or primarily internet-based. The internet is a surefire way to reach the greatest amount of people in the least amount of time and not only that, but while conducting business online, your computer soon becomes your very best organizational tool.

People who conduct business from home are realizing within just the first few months that the days of home offices filled with standard office equipment such as something as simple as a filing cabinet is no longer needed. All of your important documents and files can easily be kept on your computer and since you will surely be spending a considerable amount of time on your computer to keep up with your budding business, keeping your business files on your computer is more convenient and easier to keep track of. But what do you do when your computer gets a virus or you do a virus scan and find spyware and malware on your computer that you can’t get rid of?

There are a great deal of risks that one must take as soon as they choose to keep important documents on their computer. You must be prepared for something to go wrong with your computer at the most crucial and inopportune time. Some feel a bit safer with their documents by keeping them on an external hard drive, backing up their important files and keeping them on a private server or even keeping copies of your files, printed out and kept in a filing cabinet. One of the most convenient aspects of home businesses is that all you should need is your computer, whether it be a desktop computer or a laptop that you can easily travel with and never have to miss a day of work so keeping run of the mill office furniture in your home-based business is being counterproductive and you are making your business and organization more difficult than it has to be.

Did you know that something as simple as computer software can eliminate not only these, but many other risks that people take when doing business on a computer? A computer’s operating system is the most crucial and important aspects of your computer; if your operating system is not functioning to the best of its ability then you, and your home-based business are not functioning to the best of your ability. If you are using a PC you may feel that you are limited with what operating system you can choose to run your computer on. The simple fact of the matter is that most businesses and even people are not using the one Windows operating system that has been tested and proven to work most effectively for individual users and is the absolute best operating system for home-based and small businesses to run on–Windows Vista.

Windows Vista has less than half of the security risks that Windows XP, the most common operating system PC users are using today, has; with a 60% less likely change to be infected by spyware or malware. If that doesn’t make you more comfortable, you are also guaranteed the peace of mind and know that your important files and documents will not be lost while they are on your computer since Windows Vista has also implemented a new Windows Backup and Restore Center. Vista is the most secure Windows release to date, which is comforting since the amount of people who use and have used Windows XP know the frustration that sets in when your computer gets a virus you can’t seem to get rid of or your computer freezes or applications randomly crash for no reason. People who run small or independent businesses have polled to be up to three times more favorable of Windows Vista just after using it and adjusting to its interface and superior quality.

Since its launch, Windows Vista now supports more than double the number it supported at the time of their initial launch; the PC world is moving over to Vista–Are you willing to be more productive in your business and make the smooth transition over to Windows Vista?

Counter Offer Shenanigans on Sponsored Reviews

As it can be seen from the Disclosure Policy conveniently located in the footer of this website, I admit that while they are very few and far between, I will occasionally accept a sponsored review from a business or advertiser looking to generate buzz to their website or about their product or services.

A service that a great deal of experienced bloggers utilize in order to sell a sponsored review on their website is Sponsored Reviews. With its clean and easy to use interface, I personally find it to be a little less annoying than PayPerPost, which virtually every person with a website has ran to for some extra cash at one point or another. The way Sponsored Reviews works is a little different than what most bloggers are used to. In order to write a sponsored review you must select categories for your website, write a short description about it and then bid on reviews that advertisers have put in the marketplace that match the category in which you have placed your blog under.

Today I have run into something completely new to me when it comes to Sponsored Reviews–The advertisers’ ability to counter offer. While I have only accepted two offers on this website and those have been put on my other website only, I was a little surprised when I saw that an advertiser had sent me a counter offer on a recent bid I had made for this website. As most of you may have heard, Google PageRank has recently updated and when that happens, I always take a few moments to really dig through my statistics and see where this website stands as opposed to other websites in the same niche. After analyzing my overall statistics, I then go through my website listings that I have on services such as Sponsored Reviews and adjust my prices accordingly. Apparently, however, advertisers are likely to disagree with your proposal.

Just a few hours after bidding on a post I received an email of a counter offer over 75% lower than what I had offered in the first place. After wondering for a great deal of time if I had missed something and then realizing that advertisers are just generally known for counter offering bloggers ridiculous prices that are obviously beneath them, I counter offered them–For my original asking price.

So here is a lesson to all of the bloggers who utilize review services in order to help buy the groceries at the end of the month–When your bid receives a counter offer from an advertiser when you know damn well that the price they are countering you for is so obviously beneath you, do not buckle at the mere chance of a few dollars. As a web publisher, you must know where you stand and if you feel your website is worth $5 a post then by all means, you should most definitely be accepting $5 a post; however, if you feel as if your work is worth more, than you should be accepting no less than what you believe you are worth for your work.

Blogging Basics: Do You Have What it Takes?

This past year has easily been marked the year of the blog. Not only does virtually everyone keep a blog, whether it be on their own domain, their MySpace page or LiveJournal, but it is also the time where more and more people are realizing the amount of money that can be made by blogging. But here’s a tip for anyone looking to create their household income by blogging: It isn’t as easy as it looks.

There are many bloggers out there that are pulling in annual six-figure incomes. Some aren’t making as much, but quite a few are able to live a decent lifestyle by what they make through their websites. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is one of the top people in the blogging world right now; just look at the domain name! His website is dedicated to blogging for profit and teaching others how to benefit from blogging. Amanda Harris of Pajama Mommy is another person who not only makes a significant amount of money from her website, but her business posts go into more detail on how to do so. Another one of my personal favorites is Courtney Tuttle, who is the blogging bible as far as internet marketing goes. So how are they doing it?

Each and every successful website has a webmaster behind the scenes who has spent hours upon hours (I cannot stress the amount of time enough) marketing their websites. When thinking of your new website, think of it as practically raising something. Your website needs a lot of love and attention and if you let it go for even a few days, you have potentially lost a great deal of readers.

It takes months to build up an audience for a website and when you succeed in doing that, you cannot stop. One of the drawbacks of the internet and the society we live in today is that we 1: want instant gratification and 2: have the attention span of a gnat. Your website must bring a lot to the table that appeals to a wide variety or a large group of people and always keep in mind that there are trillions of websites on the internet today–Why do these people want to read your website? What do they get from reading your work?

If you’re thinking about blogging for profit ask yourself these few questions:

• How much time can you wholeheartedly dedicate to your website?
• Does your website appeal to a large group or wide variety of people?
• What makes your website different than the trillions already on the internet?
• If this wasn’t your website and you happened to stumble upon it, would you visit again?

This is just the very tip of the iceberg but I plan to dissect blogging for profit in several steps so check back frequently!