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Giving Your Business The Best Possible Start In 2011

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Authors: Bryce Whitty

A new year is upon us and most people have an idea of what they want to get done this year. For us Computer Technicians it might be to make more money, get more clients or spend more time with family. Whatever you are after, here are some ways to give 2011 a great start:

Set Your 2011 Goals
I dont really believe in New Year Resolutions because they tend to be broken. However, I do believe in setting measurable and achievable goals. The trick to reaching your business goals is to not only write down what the goal is, but to break it down into smaller bullet points with steps you need to take in order to achieve them. For example, your goal for 2011 might be to move your business away from doing break/fix residential work and moving towards maintenance work for businesses.
Its a good goal to have but its not very useful if you dont plan on how you are going to achieve it. It needs to be broken down into little bites that you can get done in a few days. Here is an example:

GOAL: Move my business from mostly residential clients to commercial clients
Decide on the maintenance plans:

  • Look at competitors plans
  • Ask the Technibble forums what they think of your plans (price, what you are offering, could anything come back and bite me?)

Software:

  • Try 30-day trials of various remote monitoring software
  • Purchase one of them and learn the ins-and-outs of it on your own machines
  • Setup your monitoring hardware and software in your workshop. Test it by creating problems on a test machine

Get Advertising Material Made:

  • Gather a handful of competitors advertising material, find parts on each one that you think looks great and make your own unique material based off the best parts
  • Find a graphic designer
  • Print off a very small amount

Prospects:

  • Decide on which businesses in your area you would liketo have as clients and rank them into A, B and C “grades” of desirability
  • Approach your “C grade” list of potential clients and try to sell the maintenance contracts to them. They will come up with questions that need to be answered in your advertising. This is why we wanted a small print run
  • Perfect your marketing pitch and material by approaching more C grade potential clients until many of them start signing up
  • Pitch the material that you perfected with your C grade clients to your more desirable A and B grade clients

The goal “Move my business from mostly residential clients to commercial clients” sounds like a huge task. However, if you write down your goals like this, they suddenly seem very doable.

Clean Up Your Business and Processes

  • Go through all of the stock you have and determine whether you need to throw any of it out, donate it or put it on eBay it if it could still be useful to someone. You may be surprised to find something in the back of your shelves that you really need to move before it loses too much value
  • Check that your backup systems are working
  • Get your inbox in order. Delete any old and unread emails (Friends Facebook status updates etc..). The same holds true to your work area. Remove the clutter and start the new year with a fresh start

Look At Your Finances

  • Is there anything better you could be doing with your earnings like putting it in a high interest bank account or reinvesting it back into the business?
  • Look at your bank statements and see if there are any paid services that you no longer use
  • Look at the current plans of your utilities like internet and phones. Its very likely that they have come out with a better deal than the one you are currently on, but they just dont tell you

Other quick ideas are updating your passwords, checking your answering machine message to see if the information is still current and testing your websites links.

Feel free to leave a comment with any ideas that I may have missed.

© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Giving Your Business The Best Possible Start In 2011

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5 Easy Services to Accept Credit Cards as a Computer Technician

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Authors: Bryce Whitty

Accepting Credit Cards seems to be a question that is frequently asked on the Technibble forums. The members of our great community often chime in and mention the credit card service they are using. I have compiled this information into one easy to read post.
There are many other services out there, but these are some of the options that Technibble members are actually using.

Keep in mind, these are fast, easy and convienient ways to start accepting credit card payments but if you are doing a large amount of credit card payments (say, $75,000+ per annum) then it may be cheaper to talk to a bank as their fees are lower in the higher turnover areas. For everyone else, here are some good options to get setup quickly and cheaply:
 
Paypal – http://www.paypal.com – Supports Many Countries
Paypal is by far one of the quickest and easiest ways to start accepting credit cards. However, it isnt the cheapest.
A great way to start accepting credit card payments onsite is to create a Paypal button either on your on your main site, or on a hidden mobile friendly page. To set this up:

  • Log into Paypal, click the “Merchant Services” tab up the top
  • Click “Buy Now buttons” on the right hand side under the “Website Payments” heading
  • On the “Create Paypal payment button” page, choose “Buy Now” as the button type, make the item name something like “YourBusinessName Payment” and leave the item ID and price empty. You will need to set the currency though.
  • You can leave everything else as the default and click “Create Button”. Take the code given to you and place it on your website or a mobile friendly page (that may have this button as the only thing on it so it loads quickly on your phone).

Their fees and pricing can be found here.

 

ProPay – http://www.propay.com – USA & Canada
ProPay seems to get the most mentions on the forums. They have no setup fee but there is a small annual fee. They have no monthly minimums or long-term contracts.

They allow you and your clients to pay via Phone where you enter the credit card number on the keypad.
They also offer an iPhone attachment for free (you pay $14 shipping though) that turns your iPhone 3G or 3GS into a mobile credit card terminal which would allow you to take credit card payments while onsite. If you dont own an iPhone 3G or 3GS, they also have a mobile web interface where you can enter in credit card numbers through your phones web browser.

One thing worth mentioning is that some technicians who make use of ProPay had to pay a $1000 reserve because they deem “Computer Repair, Web and Graphic Design” as high risk. I dont know whether this will apply to all computer technicans or the decision was based off other factors specific to the members on the forums. However, one technician managed to get the reserve down to $500 because he was using the ProPay card reader.

Their fees and pricing can be found here.

 

Intuit – http://payments.intuit.com – USA & Canada (Canada only some features)
Intuit, the makers of Quickbooks got a few mentions on the forums. They offer an iPhone credit card reading attachment, a bluetooth card reader for non-iPhone devices and a bluetooth card reader with printer, also for non-iPhone devices. You can make payments via their web page or download an application that works for many smart phones including the iPhone, Blackberry, HTC, Palm and more.

There is a monthly service fee of $12.95 but no monthly minimums or setup fees.
Their fees and pricing can be found here. (click the pricing tab)

 

Squareup – http://www.squareup.com – USA
I was thinking of giving Squareup a miss because some people had questioned their reliability because they are very new on the scene. However, after asking around on the Technibble forums and the Technibble twitter, it seems a lot of technicians are making use of it. If you do over $1000 in credit card payments within the span of 7 days, the money will be held for thirty days and then put in your account.

Squareup offer a free card reader that plugs into your Apple device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) or your Android OS phone (Motorola, HTC, Samsung etc..)

Their fees and pricing can be found here (goto the ¢ tab).

 

Tyro – http://www.tyro.com – Australia
Tyro is an Australian based company that provide credit card terminals for shops, mobile based terminals that make use of GPRS while you are onsite and a web interface for everything else. With Tyro, it appears you need to pay for the terminals which are $520 for the ethernet version, $680 for the WIFI version and $780 for the GPRS model. Tyro is more expensive than the super cheap and easy startups that exist in the USA, but in Australia there isnt a whole lot of choice.

Their fees and pricing can be found here.


I tried to find some recommended options for our UK readers. However, all of the UK technicians I asked on our forums and twitter said they just use Paypal. If you know of some great UK services for accepting credit cards, please leave a comment below.

© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. 5 Easy Services to Accept Credit Cards as a Computer Technician

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Top 5 Ways To Get Backlinks To Your Business Website

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Authors: Bryce Whitty

CommitCRM

Guest Post by Bryan Vest: Bryan Vest is a web developer/SEO specialist who enjoys writing articles to help make techs websites succeed.

Search engines often use the number of links a website has from other sites as a major factor in your page ranking. Even Google’s description of their PageRank system says that, “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”.

Now before you start rushing out to spam as many links as you possibly can on every blog and forum you can possibly find, you need to know that not all links are created equal. For example, lets say you own a computer repair website. A link from another computer repair website will hold more weight with Google than a link from a home improvement website.

There are other contributing factors to the weight of a link, but we will start off with the basics. Now here are the top 5 ways to get backlinks. There are definitely way more ways out there you just have to be creative, but this will be the main 5 you will see just about everywhere.

5. Blog Comments and Forum Signatures – There are a lot of “SEO experts” and web developers that believe that blog comments and Forum Signatures are the best way to get backlinks. However, these are beneficial, but “spam commenting” is not the way to go. If you can’t add something valuable to the blog post, or offer a different point of view, don’t comment. This will get you more damage than good in the end. A good way to get high quality backlinks from blogs without putting your link actually in the post is to put your name as the keyword you are targeting and your URL as the website. For example, I am currently working on a new site targeting “Temecula Web Design” here would be a good way to get a backlink that bloggers will approve of.

As you can see it will give you a nice link back to your site without causing the blog to look like its filled with spam.

4. Directory Links – Submitting your site to directories can help you. However, like blog comments not all directories are created equal. Some directories (paid or not paid) can give you a high quality backlinks (DMOZ, Yahoo, and Business.com). For free directories you will want to make sure that more than just the home page of the directory is indexed, and that the directory has been around for at least one year if you are interested in a high quality link. The common misconception is that Google ranks websites as a whole when in fact it ranks web pages. Knowing this if you submit your site and end up on page 200 with no ranking then that link will count for almost nothing.

3. Reciprocal Links – Partnering with sites that are directly related to the subject of your site can help you. The idea here is “You scratch my back, I will scratch your back”. This is when another site links to your site while you link to theirs. This however should be used in moderation. If you have to many reciprocal links, especially if they are not directly related to your site, can actually do more damage than good. This method may require some work since not a lot webmasters are willing to link to their competition. However, if you can find sites related that are not in direct competition with your site you can hit a gold mine of links.

2. Article Posts – Article posting has huge potential to launch your site to the top of Google in the event that one of your articles gets posted on a popular site. A popular way is to contact bloggers related to your subject and ask them if they would publish an article (with your anchor text backlinks). This will actually receive a great response because to bloggers well written and unique content is what they are all about. With some time this method could be like finding oil in your back yard. Not only will you have a link on the site you wrote the article for, but there are a lot of blogs out there that just copy content from other blogs. Generally those webmasters are to lazy to remove the backlinks giving you even more links from other sites. I myself have seen a high quality article go from 1 backlink to 12 in 1 month. The best part is that the sites you get those from are all relevant to your targeted keyword as well.

1. Blog With Quality Unique Contents – It is a well known fact that Google loves blogs! If your content is truly unique and well written you will naturally receive backlinks from other sites. This is the liquid gold of backlinking. Now this method requires the most work and will take the most time, but if you do it right and spend some time on it you can easily get 20 to 30 backlinks from a well written blog post. There links are almost always on relevant websites to since they are coming from webmasters that find your information useful to their viewers as well. Over time you will naturally receive high quality backlinks boosting you to the top of Google ranks with ease.

Guest Post by Bryan Vest of Temecula Web Design

© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Top 5 Ways To Get Backlinks To Your Business Website

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The Opportunity Cost

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Authors: Bryce Whitty

CommitCRM

The Technicians on the Technibble forums brought up a very interesting topic about the “opportunity cost” of the things we do.

A good example of explaining “opportunity cost” is if a person invests $10,000 in the stock market, they deny themselves the interest that could have accrued by leaving the $10,000 in a bank account instead. The opportunity cost of the decision to invest in the stock market is the value of the interest they could have earned if they put it in the bank.

So how does this apply to Computer Technicians? Someone on the Technibble forums mentioned the idea of pre-making lengths of RJ-45 network cable and packaging them individually (such as 1m, 5m, 10m lengths). The margin would be fairly high on the products because when you buy network cable and the plugs in bulk, they work out to be fairly cheap and you can charge more for a pre-packaged cable.

One of the Technicians on the forums chimed in with this:

Once you tack in your opportunity costs (Your time not spent doing other things) and what your time is worth making your own cables for lengths shorter than 6′ is a waste of time.

Lets say that you sell network cables at $1 per foot. It takes you a minute on each end of get the wires in the right order and crimp the plug on them so that works out to 2 minutes per cable. If you sold twenty 5-foot cables for $100 and our material costs was $28 then you would have made an easy $72 for 40 minutes of work.

However, if you had purchased these pre-made cables at the same material cost of $28, you would have had these cables already in you inventory and earned $66 of your normal $100 per hour rate while you used that time to repair a clients computer.

Total cost of making them yourself:
$100 income – $28 expenses = $72 profit (at a loss of 40 minutes of time)

Total cost of purchasing the cables:
$100 income – $28 expenses = $72 profit
$72 profit +$66 you earned having used your time and skills for repair work instead = $138 profit

In this situation, the opportunity cost of making cables is the loss of $66 you could have earned if you used your diagnostic and troubleshooting skills for fix computers instead.
The figures change a bit when you are making a small amount of very long cables because then it might be worth it. A few technicians recommended Monoprice.com as one of the cheapest places to get network cables (I haven’t used it, but a few forum members have). In this example, if you were to purchase those twenty 5-foot cables from Monoprice, the total cost would have been $13.60 for the cables and about $6.60 shipping equalling $20.20 in total.
Is 40 minutes of your time worth $20.20? Probably not.

I understand that many people will make cables if they have no other work to do, but that time could be used far more effectively by reading a marketing book or doing something else to improve your business – which will in turn bring you more income.

There comes a point in the life of your business when your time and skills are too valuable. Of course, a lot of people just do it for the love of the work, and thats fine too if that is what makes them happy. I must admit I do this myself in certain areas, we just need to be aware that there is an opportunity cost in the decisions we make.

Special thanks to everyone in this thread for bringing up the topic.

© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. The Opportunity Cost

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