Software as a Service
Many SMBs are benefiting from the proliferation of options available to the SMB, including: Accounting, Customer Relationship Management, Human Resources, Internet Marketing and more. Benefits of SaaS applications include little or no start-up or license costs, pay by the number of users accessing the application so that scaling up or down is easy, no long term contracts, no capital outlays for servers and other infrastructure to run the application(s), and no administrative personnel required to keep the applications running (updates, monitoring, fixes, enhancements, etc.).

Questions to Get Answered
Once the SMB decides that it wishes to consume one or more applications in the cloud, there are a number of relevant considerations to ensure that they are selecting the “right” cloud application provider(s). These include but are not limited to:

What is the reputation of the SaaS provider?
Are they a well-known company such as Salesforce.com, Intuit, Google, or Microsoft? Companies with a reputation to protect may offer a more reliable service than a start-up. Check online blogs, review sites, small business resource communities, etc. for reviews of both the provider and the application.
Are users generally satisfied with the application functionality and usability?
Have they tried to access customer service or technical support?
Would they recommend the application to other small business users?
If the provider of the application(s) is not a known company, what is their company profile?
How long have they been in business, how many customers do they have, who are their testimonial users (if available)?
Do they have a money back guarantee?
Do they have a Service Level Agreement that specifies availability of the service, performance (e.g. response time), notice of maintenance activities, etc.?
Do they offer 24×7 support? Is it via phone, email, and online ticket? Call their technical support and see how long it takes to get a human on the line.
Do they seem knowledgeable?
Are they customer centric and eager to help?

Reliability
One critical consideration is the importance of the application to the critical functions of the business. An expense submission application may be able to tolerate some downtime; while an application that processes credit cards for customer orders or that evaluates the credit worthiness of prospective customers may have a much more profound impact on the health of the business. What is the impact of downtime (planned or unplanned)? The more critical an application, the more the business should think about a) who are the most reliable providers, and b) what will we do if and when the application is unavailable? What is the work around?

Don’t assume that because a provider uses “the cloud” that they are inherently reliable. Is the application geographically redundant or is it running in a single data center? Does it have load balancing to ensure that multiple servers can handle requests? What is the data backup and recovery strategy? The reality is that although SaaS is a great development, not all SaaS providers have the sophistication to handle mission critical applications. What is small potatoes to the provider may be the difference between business success or failure to the SMB. Again, check the available reviews, references, and user testimonials.

Beyond availability and reliability, the SMB should consider the SaaS business model, including pricing, term commitments, ability to add and subtract users (including the cost), cost and availability of upgrades, enhancements, and optional modules (functionality). As with any other purchase the SMB makes, it should do diligence to ensure that it knows what it is getting, for what cost, with what potential variables, and what commitments (exposure).

Infrastructure as a Service
For the SMB looking to take advantage of IaaS, this generally consists of the opportunity to move applications that would otherwise be run on servers on the SMB premise, to virtual server instances in the cloud that are managed by a third party cloud provider, and offer many of the benefits of the SaaS scenario above. Cloud server instances can be created on the fly, can be started and stopped as required by the application(s), eliminate the acquisition and administration of physical server resources (these are managed by the cloud provider), and often are more reliable than servers running “on-prem”, as they are backed up by redundant data centers, network connections, server hardware, and 24×7 monitoring and support.

Questions to Get Answered
For the SMB considering moving applications from on-premise servers to cloud server instances, the following considerations are relevant:

What is the reputation and reliability of the provider?
What is the expected cost? How am I being billed? If based on usage (i.e. variable), how will that compare to my current costs? Hourly costs may seem lower on the surface, but if the servers are going to be available all the time to users, what is the total cost?
How friendly and functional is the user interface? What is the overall user experience like? How does is vary from provider to provider?
Does somebody within the company “own” the service and the relationship with the provider(s)?
Who will do the planning, implementation, and ongoing evaluation of the results?
Is your data backed up? How often? Can you initiate a back up? How is the data retrieved?
What redundancy is available for each server?
If a server fails, what is the restoration process? Can you access and restore backups yourself?
What kind of support is available and how much does it cost?

Again, cloud offers phenomenal advances in cost, functionality, and reliability. But like any purchase the SMB makes, it should be done with eyes open and as an astute purchaser.

Todd Benjamin is the vice president of Enterprise Hosting at Hostway Corporation.

Security Issues in Public Clouds
In a public cloud environment, the end user has a solution that is highly automated. Customers can put their applications in the cloud and control all of the individual attributes of their services.
The public cloud does not have the visibility or control of a private model. You give up some control over the location of processing when using the public cloud. In a private cloud, you have fewer people sharing resources with more pinpoint control. Managing the security risks of each environment is attainable by following some best practices for both internally and externally.

Follow Best Practices
Instituting identity management controls is a crucial first step. You need true randomization with strict adherence by all staff members to password creation protocols. It’s shocking to see how many people still use “password” or “12345” as passwords for even the most sensitive data access points. Using LDAP controls and administering credentials will keep information in one location.

After you shore up your internal credentials processes, you should look closely at your outsourced team. Do they follow your security protocols and conduct background checks and other initiatives that protect and control the flow of your data? Data segregation is vital, especially for public environments. Solution providers need to utilize the best encryption tools to keep your data in a safe and usable state. You also need them to provide their best managed services including firewalls and advanced intrusion detection systems.

Legal Aspects of Cloud Storage
There are many legal issues relating to data storage, especially any personally identifiable information (PII) that you might possess. Even though data is “in the cloud,” it still resides somewhere and rules are in place that dictate where it can travel. Some countries, such as many in Europe, have very strict data security requirements that limit where the data can be stored or moved. Choose a solution provider that knows the rules and can quickly locate your data if needed in order to fall into compliance. According to Gartner research, 40 or more states have formal regulations in place governing how companies can protect PII. You should choose an established cloud solution provider that places system controls on the movement of PII within their cloud network.

Find the Right New Partner and Manage the Existing Ones
With relatively low barriers to entry, many cloud providers enter the market without enough expertise in staffing or technology. You need to ask a potential provider a host of questions that gets deeper into their business, such as who can access and move your data. Will they tell you about any security breaches, or just push them under the rug? Does the outsourced company have more than one location so you can set up a disaster recovery center if desired?

You can negotiate stronger encryption layers and data storage standards within the contract. Beyond the cloud provider, you also need to review any other interrelated SaaS provider and its practices. Your business relies on a variety of outsourced companies
that touch your data at different points, so it’s important to be sure there are no weak links when it comes to data management.

Outsource companies should follow defined password assignment standards that decrease the likelihood of password hijacking. With multi-tenant cloud environments, the risks are greater and the vendor needs to illustrate controls they put in place to afford some separation between tenants to lower risks.

It All Comes Together
Achieving the best possible security in both public and private environments requires setting privacy and user access requirements and finding the right solution provider. New tools to store and manage data in the cloud are on the development fast track, and as these tools are implemented, they will give users additional protection to ensure security.

Lucas Roh founded Hostway in 1998 and since then has charted the company’s growth to achieve an international presence, Hostway is ranked as one of the top-five Web hosting companies globally.

Older Web sites seem to have an advantage when it comes to search engine rankings, but a site’s age alone is not a primary factor in its ranking. A well-designed new site can rank well within a few months, if you focus on those things that give the older sites their advantage.

The ranking benefit a Web site gets as it ages is largely due to the increased trust it gains over time. This trust comes largely from inbound links and quality content.

Inbound Links

Sites that stick around over time, drawing large amounts of traffic and gaining regular backlinks, appear more trustworthy than brand-new sites with a few brand-new links. In Google’s eyes, links into a site equal trust in that site, but links are not all equally valuable. Google’s ranking algorithm looks at the link profile of a site as a whole, considering not only number of links, but also their quality and age.

A lot of links implies a lot of trust, as do links from high PageRank sites. A few high PR links can be more helpful than a lot of low PR links. On the other hand, lower quality links built up organically over a long time create a history of trust and can count more than a few high PR links that you got last week. You can’t age a link, of course, but you can work to steadily increase your number of quality links.

Content

Valuable content is important, to both your visitors and the search engines. Because the best Web sites are always adding new content, an older site will naturally have more. Of course, you can start with a lot of content, but you still need to keep growing your site. As you add content over time, you increase your potential for attracting links and SEO value.

Again, this takes time. You can compress the time needed by adding content frequently; just make sure it also provides value.

Domain Age and Expiration

Some SEOs and domain registrars will try to convince you these matter, but they don’t. A domain that’s been registered for a decade but never used has no history of providing value or gaining trust and won’t fool the search engines.

As for time to expiration, Google’s Matt Cutts stated in a video on YouTube that you should “make great content, don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered…”

What Should You Do?

Create an appealing Web site with good internal structure and room to grow logically. Keep your coding clean, your directories logical and make sure internal links work. Then get your site live with a plan for regularly adding fresh content.

This strategy gives your site a chance to start building a history with the search engines. In addition, as you trickle in content over time, you keep the site fresh, and you can announce new content as you put it up, hopefully getting natural links in to that content. This will build a natural trust with the search engines.

About the Author

Melissa J Luther, owner and founder of LookSee Information Solutions, LLC, helps small businesses create and maintain a strong online presence. She takes a multi-channel approach, with a well-optimized Web site as the center of an online presence that includes content creation, PPC advertising, linking and social media as appropriate.

You are collecting analytics data on your Web site, but there’s just so much of it, and you have so little time to analyze it. Understanding your analytics data can help you grow your business, so make the most of your limited time by focusing on those reports that provide you with the most actionable data. You want to know how visitors are finding you and what they are doing once they do.

Conversions

Unless yours is a strictly informational site, conversion will be a major goal. What constitutes a good conversion rate will vary by type of conversion and your industry, but in general, a rate between 1% and 3% is acceptable. If yours is below that, or starts falling, evaluate your site or advertising message to figure out why.

Entry Pages

If you’ve done your SEO and link-building right, most people will be arriving at your site via pages other than the home page or ad-specific landing pages. If a large number of visitors are entering at unexpected pages, reevaluate those pages to ensure they are delivering an appropriate message, and not inadvertently turning away visitors, which leads to the next metric.

Exit Pages and Bounces

A “bounce” occurs when your visitor leaves without viewing any additional pages. If a large percentage of visitors are bouncing, determine which pages they are bouncing from, and if a few pages are generating most of the bounces, redesign them to be more appealing.

Exit pages are less important, since people will eventually leave your site, but if they all leave from a particular page without converting, try to figure out why.

Keywords

Visitors may not use the keywords you expect to find your site. Insight into the words people are actually using can help you design your next ad campaign or develop new content around keywords that you had not thought of.

Referrers

While not critical, it can be useful to know where your visitors come from. If some sites are sending a lot of traffic, it may be worth trying to get additional backlinks from them. In addition, if you have paid directory listings, you want to know if they are sending you any worthwhile traffic. If not, they may not be worth their cost.

Unique and Returning Visitors

These are not the most important numbers, but if you have time, they are a good way to quickly evaluate trends. You need both new traffic and repeat customers, so look at these numbers to see how they trend. If they go down, you’ll want to evaluate why.

If you are using Google Analytics, there is one potential snag in your analytics intelligence. Google has just launched a browser plugin to allow users to block Google from tracking them, which could reduce the accuracy of your data. On the other hand, most people probably won’t bother to use it, and as long as you focus on trends, rather than absolute numbers, you will still gain valuable insight about your Web site’s performance.

About the Author

Melissa J Luther, owner and founder of LookSee Information Solutions, LLC, helps small businesses create and maintain a strong Internet presence. She takes a multi-channel approach, with a well-optimized Web site as the center of an Internet presence that includes content creation, PPC advertising, linking and social media as appropriate.

Have you seen those little square images, made up of more little squares, that have been showing up in magazines, newspapers and on Web sites? These are QR codes, and they’ve become the newest way to provide potential customers with additional information about you and your services or products.

QR Code History

QR codes arose out of the need to encode more data than the standard bar code can handle. The bar code can contain up to 20 digits, while a QR code can hold more than 7,000 numbers. It can also handle alphanumeric and binary data, making it much more versatile than a bar code.

QR stands for Quick Response, because they are intended to be decoded quickly. They were originally created by a Japanese company, Denso Wave, and were used in the auto industry to track parts. Over time, other companies began to find additional uses for them.

QR Codes Today

The ubiquity of mobile devices today has led to new uses for the QR code. A phone, or other mobile device, with a camera and special decoding software can “read” the data in the QR code and take whatever action is encoded there. The code may direct the device to:

• Visit a Web site
• Dial a phone number
• Download a file or coupon
• Display additional information, such as contact or product details

These codes are equally useful online and offline. Currently they seem to be used most commonly to encode a URL for users to visit for more information, but as their use grows, so will the information they provide.

Where Can a Business Put QR Codes?

The uses for QR codes appear limited only by your imagination. Because they can hold so much information, they add flexibility to traditional marketing avenues. Consider:

• Business Cards: Encode your contact details so that users can automatically download it to their phones.
• Direct Mail Postcards: Direct recipients to a website or coupon.
• Offline Ads: Provide additional information on your service or product that won’t fit into a small display ad.
• Signs: Again, space is limited, so keep your sign uncluttered by including only your main message and using a QR code to provide additional details.
• Product Packaging: Plenty of consumers want more information about a product they run across in the store. Add a QR code to either direct them to a mobile website with more details, or use the QR code to encode the details directly.

QR codes are still new enough that most people probably won’t use yours, wherever you put them. But, eventually they will understand what they are, and if you already have yours in place, you’ll be ahead of the competition. Also, if your customer base is technologically savvy, they may give you points for being an early adopter. Either way, you win.

About the Author

Melissa J Luther, owner and founder of LookSee Information Solutions, LLC, helps small businesses create and maintain a strong Internet presence. She takes a multi-channel approach, with a well-optimized Web site as the center of an Internet presence that includes content creation, PPC advertising, linking and social media as appropriate.

Small companies need concrete ways to determine their progress toward business goals. One way of assessing your company’s success is to track your online brand awareness. A successful brand is recognizable, unique and informative. Customers should be able to look at your brand name and instantly know what you are about.

When you create a company brand, it should be everywhere: prominent on your website, business cards, signage and anything else that your customers and potential customers see. Creating a memorable brand is a great way to get more recognition for your company and gain more customers.

Tracking your Brand

If you want to know if your brand is being noticed online, you will need to find a way to track online brand awareness. This is actually easier than you may think. There are many ways to track how your brand is trending on the Internet.

Google Alerts

Create a Google alert by logging into your Google account and creating a weekly or daily alert for your brand name. You will be receive emails which give you detailed information on any websites that have mentioned your brand. You will be able to click on links to these websites and read what was written.

Facebook Fans

Facebook fan pages are an excellent way to analyze your branding. Create a Facebook fan page for your company and see how many new fans you get per month. You may even want to try to increase your Facebook fans by 20 percent each month so you have a goal you’re working toward.

RSS Subscriptions

If your company has a website, your customers should be able to sign up for updates through the RSS feed. Track your subscriptions to get a good idea of how interested people are in your company brand. Create a goal for a certain number of new subscribers per month.

Brand Searches

There are several pieces of software which allow you to track how many times per month your brand name has been searched for online. If you have hired a Web developer for your company website, the developer should be able to deliver detailed monthly statistics for how people are getting to your site. You can also use the Google AdWords Keyword tool, which is free, to determine how many people are searching for your brand name online.

Tracking your company brand is an important way to judge the progress of your business. If your brand popularity is increasing, you know your marketing methods are probably working. If tracking shows that your brand awareness is decreasing, it might be time to hire a marketing expert or retool your advertising methods.

Having an easily recognizable brand is one of the marks of a successful business. Once you learn how to promote and track your online brand awareness, you will be able to give your company a boost when it needs it.

About the Author:

Jen Brister has been a writer, researcher and Internet marketer for three years. She makes her living writing full time, publishing videos and creating websites.

There have been serious concerns about Facebook making news recently. As a small business with a Facebook page, what security issues are you facing? The major arguments about information are of limited concern to businesses, which are using their Facebook profile to get their information out to a bigger audience in the first place, but will affect the experience and quality of their Facebook audience.

User Security Scare

The main problem, from a user perspective, is the difficulty of controlling who sees the information contained in their personal profile. The tendency for Facebook to suddenly make big changes in the user experience also worries many. Facebook does notify users when these changes occur, but the message gets lost in a wave of other boring company communication, and most users simply click past it.

Seeds of Doubt

Recent privacy scandals on Facebook have included the Beacon program, which have tracked user’s Web activity and shared it with their friends without permission. The potential exploitation of this information had marketers salivating, but was stopped in its tracks. However, the increase in profile hacking, nefarious Group invitations, and strange Page suggestions and Friend requests, are tarnishing the site daily. For a while, Facebook was a safe space, but no more. Users are more wary than ever of giving out information, even it is to access a company promotion.

Privacy Policing

Third-party applications (apps like Farmville or Mob Wars) can get information on anyone or any page who has agreed to it, and not just the information necessary to run them. Additionally, keep in mind that any pages you administer are linked to your personal profile. Even if there are no apps on your page, once that connection is established, apps on your personal profile have back-door access to information on who likes your page.

The developers of these applications sign agreements that they will only use the information they need for their application, and will not store it longer than necessary on their servers, but Facebook itself admits that this agreement has no enforcement to back it up (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9854409-46.html for more details).

Safety First

To protect your page and that of anyone connected with it on Facebook, do not install (through Add to My Page) any third party applications unless they are completely controlled by your business. Carefully evaluate any links and Likes before proceeding. Do not share full names or emails of employees, and do not link to their Facebook profiles on your page. Respect the privacy of contest winners by only using their first names and getting signed permission to use any photo likenesses. Use your page solely to update about your business, and if you have the discussion feature enabled, aggressively moderate all comments for privacy violations.

Security settings have recently been simplified, but most users have no idea how open their profiles are to this mass of developers, and may be unaware that they have the option to block applications that their friends have installed from access to their personal information.

About the Author

Joanna Fletcher is a netizen who has lived, worked and played in virtual space for most of her adult life. Her entrepreneurial drive is exceeded only by her tolerance for failure.

Your company website is one of the most important aspects of your company’s brand. If you have an effective, fast and easily accessible website, your sales will increase, and your client base will expand. If you find that your website is not quite up to par, you may wish to do a complete redesign. When you are redesigning your company website, there are several things that you need to do in order to make certain that it is ready to go live.

Website Redesign Checklist

• Check to make sure that the navigation is easy to use. Have several people who have never seen your new website have a look at it and try to navigate their way around. If they have no problem getting to where they want to go on your site, then your navigation is probably ready to use.

• Contact form. Run through the process of submitting a message through the contact form on your website. Check to make sure that the message gets through and time how long it takes for the company to receive the message.

• Discussion forums. If your website has discussion forums, have a few employees to start threads on the forums to make sure that they are working correctly. When you have an active forum on your website, your clients can exchange information and make your Web content much more interesting.

• Site speed. Have your Web developer test the site to see how fast it loads into the browser. If your site takes too long to load, many users will simply click away from it. It should load quickly and correctly.

• Graphics. Are the graphics easily viewed? Do they take too long to load? If so, they need to be redesigned. Have viewers of all ages look at the graphics to make sure that they can easily be seen and understood.

• Browsers. Check to make sure that your website loads correctly in all Web browsers. You should include Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, iPhone and any others that you can think of.

• Proofread. Hire a professional proofreader to look over your website. It is a huge mistake to let your site go live with grammar and spelling errors.

• Links. Have someone check each and every live link on your site to make sure that they are working correctly. This could make the difference in making a little bit of money from your site or making a substantial amount.

Before Your Web Site Goes Live

Before your site goes live, you need to make sure that you have all the information on how to access your website written down. There are plenty of business owners who have no idea how to access their own website. You should be able to access your website files and even make small changes such as adding new content. Make sure that you know how to do these things before your site goes live.

Have an attorney look over your legal policy for your website. If you are collecting user information such as email addresses, your site must have a legal policy page. Have your attorney look over it before it goes live to make sure that it includes everything that it must in order to be legal.

About the Author

Jen Brister has been a writer, researcher and Internet marketer for three years. She makes her living writing full time, publishing videos and creating websites.

With the increasing popularity of social media websites such as Facebook, many small companies are using paid advertisements on these sites to drive traffic to the company website. This is a very effective marketing strategy as long as you know exactly what you’re doing. If you create a paid ad on a website such as Facebook or MySpace, and you don’t target the right audience, your ad is not going to generate much revenue or traffic for your website. However, if done correctly, you can use paid ads to your advantage to gain new and loyal customers for your business.

Who Is Your Target Customer?

If you want to be able to advertise effectively on social media sites, you will need to figure out who, exactly, your target customer is. If you are advertising cosmetics, you might wish to target young women. If you are advertising auto parts, you should be targeting those people who are interested in certain types of cars or auto mechanics.

The beauty of advertising on social media sites is that you can create highly specific and targeted ads and have them shown to only the people that you wish to be in your audience. If you are targeting women who have school age children, then the Facebook ad managers can make it so that your ads are only seen by women who have children in school. This kind of highly targeted advertisement can result in a much higher conversion rate than a regular ad.

Advantages

One advantage to social media advertising is that the ads are easy, fast and inexpensive to produce. If you are advertising on radio or television, you already know how expensive and time consuming it can be to create an ad. When placing ads on social media, all you really need is a good-looking graphic and a line or two of text about your product.

Another advantage of this type of advertising is that your ad will be seen by millions of views. Since social media sites have readers that check in several times per day, your ad will be seen each day by viewers that are interested in your product. In contrast with TV ads, the viewer will not have to be watching TV at the exact time your ad comes on. With social media ads, the ad is there waiting for them to log on and be viewed.

Types of Social Media Ads

If you are trying to figure out which social media ad is right for your small business, why not do a little research with several different kinds. You can pay a very small price for a few sponsored tweets on Twitter. You can also have colorful banner ads placed next to the pages of targeted users on Facebook or MySpace. Using a free method of social media advertising is also effective. Set up a Facebook fan page and Twitter account for your company. Use both to gain followers who are interested in what you have to say. You can then, at any time, tweet or post about a new product, a sale, or a special discount for users.

Advertising on social media is all about finding the right target. By knowing who your audience is, you can advertise to them and remove uncertainty from the equation.

About the Author

Jen Brister has been a writer, researcher and Internet marketer for three years. She makes her living writing full time, publishing videos and creating websites.

Social media platforms and ecommerce go together like cookies and milk. For years, both brick-and-mortar and online businesses have used the positive brand building effects of social networking to communicate in meaningful ways with customers. Ecommerce sites can now increase sales of their products using Facebook applications created especially for online businesses. Read about some of the best ones below.

Payvment

The Payvment application allows users to develop an online retail store on Facebook. The app converts any online page into an ecommerce site with only one line of code. The program works with PayPal X global open payments platform. This PayPal platform allows visitors to shop at multiple stores with one shopping cart.

Slideshare

Slideshare lets businesses upload product presentations, promotional materials and sales announcements to their pages and profiles. The program even allows for the delivery of coupons to current and potential customers. These features drive more traffic to the user’s ecommerce site.

NutshellMail for Enewsletters

Any Facebook page administrator can use NutshellMail for Enewsletters to create an email newsletter campaign. Users add an email newsletter tab to their page. Fans then opt-in to receive the newsletters via email. The program automatically compiles a collection of page updates, puts them in newsletter format, and sends it to subscribers. Page administrators determine how often the updates go out.

Promotions

Promotions allows ecommerce businesses to launch interactive marketing campaigns, sweepstakes and giveaways right from their Facebook business page. Interested people can try one of the free versions before deciding to purchase the reasonably priced full version.

ShopTab

ShopTab allows businesses to sell products directly from an existing ecommerce site on their Facebook page. The application creates a shopping tab on the Fan page. Owners export products from their ecommerce site using an ecommerce tool and load them onto ShopTab on Facebook. It is priced for small business at $10 to $20 per month.

This recent marriage of ecommerce and social networking provides businesses with a way to communicate in relevant and meaningful ways with fans driving sales higher for ecommerce based stores.

About the Author

Samantha Gluck has had over a decade of experience helping businesses better focus their websites to enhance ecommerce and Internet presence by utilizing Web analytics, relevant design elements, and marketing campaigns.