The goWholesale Blog

Avoid Spring Cleaning (sort of) - 4 Ways to Clear Computer Clutter

April 1st, 2008

April 1st. Many know it by it’s widely known and celebrated OTHER name…April Fool’s Day. Unfortunately, for many others it’s also officially the first day of facing projects they’ve managed so diligently to put off all winter. And what is usually at the top of everyone’s list? That’s right, (cue Beethoven’s 5th):

Spring Cleaning!

(Yeah, I know…I thought maybe the happy colors would make it less painful but alas, there is no way to overcome the incredible demoralizing strength of those two words combined. They continue to stand the test of Time…and apparently the test of Color Wheel as well.)

Fortunately, I have an alternative for those who wish to avoid the catastrophes otherwise known as basements, garages and landscaping. Why not take this opportunity to a little spring cleaning–er–organizational restructuring for your business? Now I don’t mean you’re whole business. Just focus on your computer. It’s probably full of backlogged information that you could easily do without not only from an aesthetic aspect but also in the sense that getting rid of needless files and emails will make your computer run faster.

Courtesy ManageSmarter.com and My Computer Works , a PC repair company, here are 4 easy ways to clear your computer clutter:

1. Slow E-mail
Topping the list of performance issues for most people is e-mail problems. Some issues are caused by settings that are incorrectly entered into the e-mail application. However, it is possible to speed up Microsoft Outlook and other popular e-mail programs by archiving or pruning old e-mails, especially those with attachments. Deleting unneeded messages from the Sent folder and emptying the Deleted Items folder will also allow the software to open and operate smoothly.

2. Sluggish Operations
Another common problem is deteriorating PC performance. Boot-ups seem to take forever, applications don’t load as fast and the dreaded "blue screen of death" shows up more and more often. There are a number of things owners can do to improve the situation: defragment the hard drive using the Disk Defragmenter utility in Windows, remove unneeded personal files as well as old or unused programs, many of which get automatically loaded with new software whether you want them or not, remove unused programs. If run-time is still down after deleting the digital clutter, users should look into purchasing more RAM from a local retailer.

3. Security
Malware, spyware, viruses and other PC infections can slow PC performance, but they can also damage files and compromise highly confidential information such as email and financial data. It’s essential to install, and routinely update, anti-virus and anti-spyware/malware programs. Make sure the programs are set to scan files, e-mail and memory on a regular basis.

4. Periodic Cleanup/Backup
A little housekeeping can extend a PCs life and ensure that important information is never lost. Dust is a major problem with both laptops and desktop units; tower units are especially prone to dirt and dust since they usually sit on the floor. To clean a PC case, remove the side panel and use a can of compressed air to blow away dust. Never use a vacuum, as the suction causes static that can short-circuit delicate electronics. The last and perhaps most important task of all is to back up data at least weekly: PCs are replaceable, but photos, videos, financials and business data can be lost forever.

Taking the time to give your computer a little love will likely save you time and gray hairs…so grab a snack, plop down in front of that PC and knock it out. Come on, it’s gotta be better than whatever is waiting for you in the attic, right?

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Social Shopping Sites Bring More Opportunity to Small Businesses

March 31st, 2008

Interesting thing isn’t it? How the internet has completely replaced the need to leave your house to buy things. Shopping malls were once the great meccas of consumerism. What a shame….What’s that you say? They still are? Oh….how is that possible? The internet has EVERYTHING and you don’t even have to get off your duff to get it!

Sarcasm aside, in spite of the incredible convenience the internet affords, people are still flocking to malls around the world to find what they are looking for. So why is that? I thought the internet was supposed to make things easier?

The reason for this according to a recent Inc.com article, is that while shopping can be done individually, it is largely a social activity. We rely on recommendations from our friends and family to locate sources for certain products we may be interested in because we trust these people to give us good leads. In the internet world, all we’ve had to rely on are the search results Google and the like produce for us which, as we savvy internet users have come to find out, is based primarily on variables that do not have the consumer in mind, often producing the most prominent (read "well known") sites first.

We’re in luck though. Smart entrepreneurs have recognized this and are doing something about it. For the first time, we are starting to see websites dedicated to tailoring the online shopping experience directly towards the consumer. Sites such as ThisNext , Shoposphere and Kaboodle are what is called "social shopping" sites. And here’s what they do:

As a small business marketer here’s how and why you can use these sites to grow your business:

Just remember to be a responsible member of these communities. Many of them self police anyway but you cannot approach it from a strict marketing standpoint. Don’t be intrusive and abuse the system. Merely develop good relationships and allow it to work for you.

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The Online Shoppers Cometh - Are You Ready(eth?)

March 26th, 2008

Well friends, it’s finally happened. People are now officially computer savvy. Or at least according to a 2007 Forrester Research report almost 75% of us have learned how to successfully shop online and the the number of late comers to the internet party continues to dwindle each year. That’s great news for online businesses! But it’s also a bit of a double edged sword.

These findings indicate that more and more people are getting familiar with navigating the internet and therefore learning how different websites hinder or facilitate their online shopping experiences. And guess what that means? It means that on the whole, people’s expectations are much higher–and growing alongside their experience.

So what does this mean for you? Well, quite simply it means that your emphasis on getting customers to your site should now be shifting to retaining customers. People are now quite comfortable with turning to the internet to get whatever products they need so you know that the traffic is there. You must now "wow" these customers with your quality of service and streamlined shopping experience. If customers think, even for a split second, that it’s too difficult to find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll be out of there faster than you can blink.

So do yourself a favor and invest a little time and money into making your website stellar! Visit our Ecommerce and Ebusines Articles for more advice, tips and info!

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10 Totally Free Blogging (among other things) Guides…Totally!

March 21st, 2008

There’s no question anymore as to whether or not blogging is beneficial to businesses–it IS. Wait. Allow me to rephrase…GOOD blogging is beneficial to businesses. If you run your blog poorly, it becomes a waste of your time as well as the time of your readers (dare I say customers ?) and no one likes to be inconvenienced, especially not consumers. I know, I know…nothing you don’t already know.

Well, if you have decided not to pursue blogging due to time, money and/or resource constraints then I suppose you needn’t read on. But if you do run a company blog and are looking to make it worth your while, by all means, check out these 10 completely free guides to building a better blog courtesy chrisg.com :

1. The Blogger’s Guide to SEO - Written by Aaron Wall of SEOBook, learn how to optimize your blog.

2. Remarkablogger’s How to Start A Business Blog - 12 Step Business Blogging eBook

3. "Attention Age" - Web 2.0 Marketing by Rich Schefren

4. Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online - Brian Clark’s free ebook shows you how to forget everything you know about making money … and start making some.

5. Blog Profits Blueprint - ebook about how to make money with a blog.

6. SEO Benefits of Press Releases - optimizing your web page with good content.

7. Authority Black Book - Social Media Marketing ebook.

8. Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging - Chitika’s ebook…also links to the BlogBash ebook.

9. Keyword Research for Bloggers - the title says it all!

10. The 4 Phases of Internet Marketing - This report provides you an overview of all the tactics you should be looking at building into your internet marketing strategy.

Do you find these helpful? Let me know so I can either keep trying to find similar resources or move on to different ones. Also feel free too add your suggestions to the list!

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The Counterfeit Crisis

March 18th, 2008

There is quite a lengthy article on the Modern Distribution Management website that explores one of the biggest problems the wholesale/retail industry faces — counterfeiting. It sites statistics such as "The Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau estimates counterfeiting accounts for 5 percent to 7 percent of world trade" and "most counterfeit goods (close to 95 percent) can be traced back to China, according to a report from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition."

While counterfeiting is not a new trade by any means, what IS new is how the development of e-commerce has aided in its proliferation. “The Internet has made it possible for people to represent themselves more readily to more people in a professional manner that makes it look like they are legitimate.” So what is the industry doing to counteract this widespread (and growing) problem?

Well, there have been many associations; national government policies; and international agreements that were formed as part of the World Trade Organization. Individually, companies can create agreements with "authorized distributors" as well as pursue legal action upon catching any counterfeiters.

What are you doing to protect yourself from fakes ?

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6 SEO tactics to avoid

March 4th, 2008

Any business with a website wants theirs to pop up when people search for their product. Wanting this to happen is one thing, while achieving it is very much another. Success usually comes from diligent and patient SEO efforts but some web owners get a little antsy and decide they want results NOW.

This is not a good idea. If you want immediate results it’s likely you’ll have to ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking your website is the best (which it very well may be) but let me let you in on a little secret….search engines don’t take to kindly to being fooled. The result can be banishment from the search engine which will effectively crush your online dreams.

So here are 6 tactics that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN regard as ’shady’ and will penalize you for using (courtesy MarketingProfs.com ).

1. Link Farms - There’s general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a Web page. A link farm is a group of Web sites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given Web site. These links are not "real" (in terms of signaling the quality of the site they link to), and so they are trying distort search engine results.

2. Automated Content/Duplication - Search engines like content. They particularly like frequently updated content. Unfortunately, creating unique content takes time and energy. To try to trigger search engine spiders to index more pages from a Web site, and do so more frequently, some may try to auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites and republish it.

This technique often goes hand in hand with link farms (because if you’re creating thousands of sites, you need some content to put on them in order to get the search engines to index them and for the links to matter).

Google has gotten very good at determining what is "natural" content vs. content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value. As for duplicating content on other Web sites without permission, this is often in violation of copyright laws, and it’s unethical.

3. Keyword Stuffing - This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword in the hopes of influencing search engine results. Search engines caught on to this trick many years ago, yet it remains popular for some reason.

4. Cloaking - This practice involves delivering different Web site content to the search engine spiders than is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but to send different content to real users. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you’re suspected of using cloaking, it’s easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your Web site as a human and check whether you’re cloaking. This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.

5. Hidden Text - This technique "hides" text on the Web page that search spiders will index (for ranking purposes), but is invisible to a human. The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background.

Based on how sophisticated you want to get, it could be based on something as simple as tags in the HTML, CSS stylings or Javascript that changes the page dynamically. Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.

6. Doorway/Gateway Pages - This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to spiders, a doorway page involves getting a given page (the "doorway page") to rank well in the search engines, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end-users as they don’t get the content they would have expected.

For more information on the right way to build links please read "Link Building Tips for Beginners "

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Online accounting tools reviewed

February 29th, 2008

There are a number of very good accounting software applications that you can buy and install on your computer. These are tried an true programs that are specifically designed to make your life easier when it comes to keeping the books.

But what if I told you that it could be even easier ? That’s right. You can save time (and maybe a little money) by using online applications to do your finances.

FreelancerSwitch reviews 7 of these bad boys so check em out!

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Top 5 Bummers Of Online Social Networking

February 20th, 2008

You’ve heard the countless praises of online social networking, but as with anything, there is some bad that comes with all the good. And so I give you the five biggest bummers of participating in online social networking.

5. Scams

This one is pretty easy to understand but very important to consider. There is plenty of white-collar crime that goes down on the internet and social networking sites are not exempt. The anonymity the internet provides opens the door to con-artists and scammers so you have to beware.

4. There’s so many - How do you keep up?

Since the explosion of Myspace and Facebook (personal oriented) and LinkedIn (business oriented), social networking sites have been springing up everywhere. So which ones do you join? If you join too many, it could become a full time job keeping up with all those different networks. If you don’t join enough, you could be missing out on valuable networking opportunities. Where do you draw the line?

3. The stereotype of joining for self-interested reasons

Let’s be honest. Most people (who are not Gen Yers) are going to be joining these networks to promote their business. And if you are one of these people that’s fine. BUT, you’re not the only one who knows that. So you are going to have to fight, or rather work that much harder to get people to believe that you are truly interested in them/their business.

2. Time and resources

Whether you join many or few networking communities, you will have to commit time and resources to the task of creating and maintaining any relationships you might form. And even after all of this work it’s possible you may not even glean any postitive results! While the relationships you can form can be good (or dare I say, great) for business, you’ll have to weigh the return on investment here.

1. It’s impersonal

There’s no two ways about it. Networking the ‘old fashioned’ way allowed people to read body language, watch immediate reactions and learn first hand what others’ businesses do and what problems they are facing. While the internet is quite "instant" it has enabled delays between personal communication and this has damaging effects on business. There’s really nothing that compares to face to face interaction.

I would like to state here that I personally believe online social networking is crucial to e-commerce/business. There is a whole wide world (literally) of opportunity with this avenue and I recommend exploring it. Just keep in mind the other side of the coin as you make your decision! :)

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Mob Shopping: Is America Ready?

February 19th, 2008

Are you?

Mob shopping, also known as team buying, is a consumer buying tactic originating in China, that involves gathering a group of people together in-store to drive a bargain with the seller. There are many websites and forums (TeamBuy.com.cn ) that facilitate the time and place. The popularity of these events is mostly due to the cultural ideology that no price is set in stone and that bargaining is a way of life in China. And consumers are seeing results. While many sellers do not particularly like this new tactic, some are embracing it and even setting up events themselves so that the teams who are willing to buy right away will get a discount.

The internet is a large part of the success as the instant communication is vital to organizing these sometimes spur of the moment events. Also, the with internet’s world wide reach more and more people are becoming exposed to the idea… and it’s catching on.

So what do you think? Will this shopping craze work in America? As a store owner, would you be willing to bargain with these groups of people in order to move more product?

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Company Wikis taking off

February 15th, 2008

I don’t know about you, but whether when I have a question about a person, a process, a product, a band, etc. my first stop on my road to discovery is usually Wikipedia, one of the most popular online information resources. And for the first time in history, the editors are the readers!

But the point of this post is not to sing the praises of Wikipedia, rather sing the praises of the concept of the Wiki. Did you know that small businesses are using Wikis to better organize and present information? Did you know that you could be doing the same thing?

More and more businesses are doing this because they claim it is far easier and more effective in communicating information throughout the company. Employees can create, manage and edit pages and keep each other informed and updated. Many companies use wikis strictly for internal use, but more are opening them up to customers as well.

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