E-mail is an extremely valuable business communication channel for all managers and executives.  It is also the face of your company.  Dashing off emails without a review can have unintended results.   A little planning, forethought and following the email tips below can vastly improve the outcome.  Establish good guidelines for your company communications and follow them.

Here are 10 basic tips for better e-mail use and management.

1.  Use e-mail as one channel of communication, but not your only one. It’s fast and easy. It can document discussions. It enables high-impact messages to be sent around the world with the click of a mouse. But it also misleads bosses into thinking they can manage large groups of people through regular group e-mail. Use e-mail wisely, but don’t manage your company through it. You won’t reach everybody you need to reach and your presence won’t be felt.

2.  Keep it short and sweet and don’t allow e-mail threads longer than a football field. Know that e-mails longer than one screen-full often aren’t read right away; they get shoved to the end of the day or the next morning. Know also when it’s time to put down the mouse and go talk to someone, or pick up the phone. There comes a point when further e-mailing eats up time unnecessarily.

3.  Decode your messages as much as possible.  Say what you really want to have happen.  Start with the subject line: Make it clear and compelling (and be willing to change it when the subject in a thread changes). Be certain about who really needs to be on the “to:” and the “cc:” line. Be clear about action items and priorities. Spell them out, as lists or bulleted items. Include a response button or some other mechanism if you must know that everyone has read and understood your message.

4.  Encourage people to respond with questions. That’s akin to keeping your office door open.
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Is It the Right Move for Your Organization?

Most small businesses have quite a lot on the plate and team members wear multiple hats. Between meeting the needs of your customers, generating new business, worrying about employee issues and managing the day-to-day finances of your company, do you really have time to concentrate on your email system or worry about the latest online virus?  More and more small businesses are simply outsourcing these tasks, leaving the associated burden and headaches to a trusted industry expert.

There are a number of key benefits to Hosted Exchange that work well for organizations of all sizes.  Depending on whether you currently use on-premise Exchange as opposed to POP mail, your existing technology approach and support infrastructure, these may work well for you: Continue Reading >>

Getting noticed on the Web and more importantly driving meaningful traffic that generates real leads is both an art and a science. A Web page can provide useful information about a popular subject in an interactive and engrossing way, yet still attract few visitors. One of the most reliable ways to improve traffic is to achieve a high ranking on search engine return pages (SERPs). For example, a search for “air condition service” on Google yields many results.  There are local listings, paid ads, organic results.  Where does your Web page rank for your key words?  How can you help it rise to the top?

Imagine that you’ve created the definitive Web site on a subject — we’ll use “air conditioning service” as an example. Your site is so new that it’s not even listed on any SERPs yet, so your first step is to submit your site to search engines like Google and Yahoo. The Web pages on your air conditioning service site include useful information, exciting photographs and helpful links guiding visitors to other resources. Even with the best information about air conditioning service on the Web, your site may not crack the top page of results on major search engines. When people search for the term “air conditioning service,” they could end up going to inferior Web sites because yours isn’t in the top results.

While most search engine companies try to keep their processes a secret, their criteria for high spots on SERPs isn’t a complete mystery. Search engines are successful only if they provide a user links to the best Web sites related to the user’s search terms. If your site is the best skydiving resource on the Web, it benefits search engines to list the site high up on their SERPs. You just have to find a way to show search engines that your site belongs at the top of the heap. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in — it’s a collection of techniques a webmaster can use to improve his or her site’s SERP position.

Search Engine Optimization Must be Targeted
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 For most small business owners, email is their lifeblood. In fact, in a Gartner and Symantec study, it was determined that up to 75% of a company’s intellectual property resides in its email and other messaging applications.  As a mission-critical part of your business, email simply has to work, be fast and always be accessible from the road or home. Today, this means being able to access your email and calendar directly from your cell phone, BlackBerry or other mobile device, so you’re never out of touch with your business.   But as critical as email is to most companies, it is important to remember that managing your email infrastructure (i.e., mail servers) is not usually directly related to the products or services you sell. To be successful, you have to focus on growing your bottom line, not on making sure your email is working, which can be both time consuming and expensive. 

 The good news is that a variety of hosted services are available for small businesses – services that were once only reserved for the biggest corporations.  Hosted services, also known as Software as a Service or SaaS, are software applications that you access through the Internet. Hosting vendors store the information on their own servers and manage the entire system for you, helping to drastically reduce the time and energy you spend on keeping your email up and running.  Primed for enormous growth and widespread adoption, Gartner Consulting predicts that SaaS is growing from just 5 percent of software revenues in 2005 to nearly a third of all software revenues by the end of the decade. 
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1.      Set the Right Goal. Your goal should be to get visitors and leads. It shouldn’t necessarily be to change the look and feel of your company. Approach this whole Web site redesign from a marketing perspective, not based on what some creative person says looks attractive.

2.      Avoid Pitfalls.  It’s really important that you take an inventory of your Web assets and protect them through your redesign.  Know what actually works for your company. Its important you don’t remove value content. Don’t lose inbound links by changing URLs. Don’t lose keyword ranking. Don’t change good conversion tools.
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