Techsperts Talk

Is your website all that you need it to be? How about your company intranet? Check out Google for Work’s Forms and Sites offerings to see how your experience could be even better.We’ve talked quite a lot about websites over the past few years. Do you really need them? (Yes.) Are yours up to date?We’ve answered these questions, and we’ve even told you what to include on your site. But there’s one thing we haven’t talked about: How to get your site online and working well for your business.

Is your day more packed than it needs to be? Try these Techsperts-approved productivity tips to start getting more done.Try as we might to alter the laws of nature, we all only have 24 hours a day. And when you factor in things like eating, sleeping, and running errands, even the most productive among us only have 8 or 10 hours to get it all done.But it is possible to become more productive. Sometimes, the bad habits we've picked up along the way are holding our time hostage. And sometimes, it turns out that things we thought were productive turn out to be exactly the opposite (hard stare in the direction of multitasking). How can we tell the good from the bad?

What You Need to Know About Backing Up Your Data 

Losing all your important data can send your stress levels off the charts. Fortunately, implementing the right backup plan can turn a catastrophic loss to a mere inconvenience.

In order to make money, you need to spend money. This is especially true when it comes to marketing your business. To get people to choose your product or service, they need to be aware of it. To make them aware of it, you need to market it. To market it, you need to invest some money in marketing. What’s a small business with a just-getting-started budget to do?Ideally, you included some money for marketing in your startup funds. The Small Business Administration recommends that you set aside around 8% of your funds for marketing purposes. However, this will vary greatly depending on your location, the type of business you run, and other factors.

In this series, we’re talking about the value of Google Analytics for small business websites. If you’ve missed it, click here to read the first post. Before we delve into how Google Analytics works, let’s stop and consider a very important part of the program: your own digital marketing plan. Starting with your first foray into Google Academy, Google Analytics’ training program, I’ll bet you noticed something: you’re supposed to have a digital marketing plan in place. Why this insistence on a marketing plan? And how can you go about building one?

Want to know more about how Google Analytics works with your business’s website? That’s what we’ll talk about today. If you’ve missed it, this post is part of a series Techsperts Talk is doing on Google Analytics and small businesses. You can review data analytics basics in the first post, or catch up with the benefits of web analytics here.

 In this series, we explore Google’s web analytics program in the light of small-business needs. Our first post introduces the concept of analytics and why Google’s program is a good choice for small-business owners. Today, if you haven’t heard of data analytics, Big Data, or data science, it’s safe to say that you’re probably not connected to the Internet. Or your TV. Or pretty much any form of media.

If you’re looking for cloud-based productivity suite, Google Apps for Business is a strong contender. In fact, this powerful multi-functioning software should be on your short list.Productivity suites needs no introduction. Thanks to many years of using Microsoft Office and the like, small businesses basically run off of this ubiquitous program package. What makes Google Apps for Business different? Three things. First, it combines business class software with client technology, meaning that you can access your documents anywhere at any time, as long as you are connected to the internet. Second, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it can be scaled up or down as users are added or deleted. And finally, it’s very collaborative so you can work on projects in real time with co-workers in multiple locations.

Small businesses compete hard for attention – both with other small businesses and with the big guys. So it’s good to know that you don’t have to be a big business to have technology with a big impact. Here’s how small businesses can do big tech on a budget.If you’re running a small business, it’s easy to feel outnumbered. After all, small businesses are just that – little. But no matter how small your business is, you’re far from alone. There are more than 27 million small businesses in the U.S. today. And of those 27 million, the overwhelming majority (21 million) have no employees, meaning that the entire company consists of the owners.

Using blogs to reach out to your customer base makes sense. But what about micro-blogging sites like Twitter and image-oriented sites like Pinterest and Instagram?