We are excited to announce that through a partnership with CoreBanc, Magic Apple Now offers Cloud Computing.  What is Cloud Computing and why should you care?  Great question!  Do you use software like Quickbooks or Microsoft Office?  Have you ever paid multiple license fees?  How about your computer hardware,  how much of a pain was it the last time your server crashed and all that information was lost?  Ooh, I got another one.  How much do you pay every single month to keep all your computers and software up and running?

There, now that we have the why you should care out of the way, let’s look at what Cloud Computing actually is.  Cloud Computing is basically off site hosting of all your software and data.  You access your data and software from any broadband connection through a secure Remote Desktop connection.  You can be a Mac or a PC it works either way.  You basically run your business as you always did except you no longer have to worry about updating licenses and replacing expensive servers.  Check out the  site to learn more about how cloud computing and save you money and make your life as a business owner so much easier.

Why are IP cameras important for my small business?  They may not be.  If you work in an office building that has no traffic other than your own employee’s or you run your business out of your home like me, you don’t really need a camera system.  But, if you have a retail shop or a store front that has customer traffic, or you carry an inventory, or if you’ve had issues with vandalism, or……I bet you get the picture.  As the old saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words.  Video is priceless.

I bet your also thinking that the quality is pretty bad, right?  I mean, we have all seen the gas station video of the guy in a hoodie causing trouble.  “If you’ve seen this guy, please call crime stoppers”, yeah guys with blurry faces are pretty hard to miss.  The problem with those cameras is that they are cheap.  Take a look at this image.  Is this guy going to get caught?  Probably not.

Now if you were to use one of the newer HIGH DEF IP cameras you could have an image like this.

Big difference huh.

Now, I can sense your next question.  I’m not a mind reader or a Jedi,  but I am a business owner.  Your next question is, HOW MUCH WILL THIS COST ME?  Am I good or what?  Well the bad news is, their not free.  But, with a wide range of available camera’s there is a system to match just about any budget.    Do yourself and your salesperson a favor and let them know up front what your budget is.  Be honest about it.  This way your not shopping price, but rather, what you can get for your money.

If your interested in learning more about IP Camera systems give us a call or visit our website by clicking here.

Here is Dan again.  What great feature are we going to go over today?  Fax to Email of course.   If you would like to get a quote for a Magic Apple Technology System of your own, click here.

Being a small business owner myself I understand why you would say this.  Lets face it, using the economy is a great excuse to give that salesman when he calls.  But, in reality, unless you have just bought a new phone system in the last couple years you should be looking at what a good IP PBX could do for your business.  IP PBX systems, like Asterisk, are more than “just a phone”.  They can be a direct conduit in which you communicate to your customers.  You know, those people that you want to keep happy in “this economy”.  The features are robust and can quickly become an essential part of your business.  With systems starting under $1000, you should take a look.  You can get a quote for your office here.

Here is a link to a Free Telesummit to learn how to better use Twitter for your business.  Check it out and let me know what you think of it.

http://nanacast.com/vp/68957/15390/

Thanks,

Matt Lloyd

As you may know we are a custom Asterisk PBX shop.  Asterisk is a great system but can be overkill if you run a small business with less than ten employees.   So we have searched and found a solid small business VOIP PBX.  It gives you all the features you expect from a VOIP PBX while providing an easy to use interface to make moves adds and changes all on your own.  It can use either analog or sip trunks and can give your small business all the advantages of large PBX solutions.

Feature Highlights:

• Local SIP extensions, remote SIP users and SIP Trunking
  
• Auto fax detection and routing
• Visual and standard voicemail
• Voicemail to Email notification with audio attachment
  
• Operator Console
• Auto-attendant (AA) with day/night/ holiday scheduling and custom announcements
  
• Easy to use soft key management via global or local user templates with the ability to print soft key inserts
  
• XML interface to on board Push Button Input Trigger and Relay Output
  
• Built in audio in/out circuitry for music on hold and external paging
  
• Standard PBX/Key system functions such as: Busy Lamp Field (BLF), Flexible Call Forward (CFB, CFNA, CFA), 3-way Conference Calls (3WC) and Call Park
  
• Key System emulation of SLA (Shared Line Appearances) (FXO ports only) *
  
• Enhanced system features such as: Find-Me Follow-Me (FMFM), Directed Call Pickup (DCP), Aastra SIP telephone auto discovery and FXO line monitoring via GUI
  
• Up to 6 Foreign Exchange Office (FXO) ports for connection to analogue public telephone lines (PSTN). Each FXO is equipped with on-hook Caller-ID detection and G.168 echo cancellation

With this system we use the Aastra 57i handsets.

This handset is also full of great features.

• Up to 9 call appearance lines
• Shared Call and Bridged Line Appearances
  
• Multi-proxy support
• Distinctive ringing, priority alerting
• XML browser
• Personal directory
• Call forward/Call transfer/Call waiting
• Caller and calling line information
• Callers log
• Local 3-way conference
• Intercom with auto-answer
• Redial list
• Do Not Disturb
• Live dial pad or pre-dial support

So as you can see this system is  full of great features for your small business.  The pricing breaks down like this: you get the system and 6 phones for $4000 installed (not including sales tax or shipping).  To learn more about this system click here.

ASE can save you money on all of you OEM printing needs and so much more.  To learn more about everything ASE can do for you check out their site here.

We have worked with ASE on many different projects.  They had already purchased a VOIP system with the thought of doing everything on their own.  This is not uncommon over half our customers have come to us looking for help setting up an existing VOIP system. We were able to come in and get their system up and running the way they wanted.

We have also set up a surveillance system for ASE that they are very happy with.  I can’t say enough about this company.  They work extremely hard to save their customers money and provide them with a high quality product.

To learn more about what we did for ASE and what we can do for you click here.

Last time, we talked about what we did to get started on the content side of the house.  This time we are going to go over results.  Keep in mind we have been up and running for a little less than a month.  That being said we have gotten feed back.  I also want to share with you the “free tips”  I got from Hubspot.  As usual, they had some great ones.

The purpose for this exercise was to drive traffic to our site.  So how can we tell when all this stuff is working?  There are two ways we can do this.  Concrete 5 has some of this information on the Dashboard.  As you can see here.

Look at the site Activity section.  Here you can find number of visits since your last login and total number of visits.  Helpful but not earth shaking information.  On the left hand side you’ll see the Reports button.  Here you can get information about the forms on your website.  You can also manage a survey.  We have not done this yet so I can’t add to much to that.  This is nice and easy to access and understand, but we are looking to dig much deeper.  To do that we use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics  is a great tool and free to use.  You can put multiple sites on your dashboard.  We have in attached to the website and the blog.  The dashboard is pretty slick as well, see below.

To get a better look click on the image.

From here you can see great information like, how many visits, how long the average time each person stayed on your site.  You can also see the percentage of visits that came directly and came from other sites via inbound links.  From there, if you click “view report” you can get even deeper and see what sites your visitors came from.  This was interesting to me because I can see when people come into the site from a post on some one’s blog.  For example, I left a simple post on a blog that talked about Asterisk phone systems.  I was able to see that 13 different people came to visit the site from that one comment.  You can dig even deeper with another report and get each and every visit.   This sounds great right.  We thought, great now what.

How to use the information.

So here’s what we are going to do.  We are going to track this information and figure out ways to get more page views.  Then the plan is to convert those visits into new customers.

New Tips.

So, as I promised here are the tips that I got from Hubspot.  It comes down to descriptive titles for each page of your website.  You have to look at the very top of the page where the name of your website is.  This needs to say more than just your websites name.  It needs to be descriptive and you need to use your keywords.  For example.  The description for our home page was, “Magic Apple Technology”.  Now it’s “ Nashville IP PBX Consultants/ Magic Apple Technology“.   If  someone types in “IP PBX, Nashville”, in Google I want them pointed to my site.  It takes time, but in time it will work.  At least it better.

I will post Part 5 in a month or so.  I want to give this some time to see what happens.  I will update you with any new surprises along the way.

Last we left off I had told you about the book World Wide Rave, from David Meerman Scott.  In this part I want to go over what steps we have taken thus far.   Before you can start putting your new site together you have to have something to put on it.  So lets talk about content.  Our original site was basically a bunch sales talk, “We are the best at Blah Blah”, “Our products are next generation yadda yadda”.  Remember what DMS (David Meerman Scott), said?  “No one cares about your products but you.”  So we started thinking along the lines of stories and examples.  So instead of , ” We specialize in advanced communication applications.”  We told a story about one of our clients that had a need our system was able to address.  The same point was made, except someone besides myself would actually ever read it.  Isn’t that the point?  Be creative,  think about doing something different.  Also don’t forget the rule about not being tricky.  Be honest and creative.

More than words can say.

We also decided that we wanted video on the site.   We are not making the next blockbuster.  Rather a short and simple video that explains the point I want to get across.  There are many ways to get it done.  All you really need is a web cam and some simple editing software.  We did ours with the on board camera on my business partner’s Mac Book.  We used iMovie to put it all together.  Video can help you make that personal connection and help turn a visitor to your site into a lead for your business.  Here is the first one we did.

I liked the idea of video so much I wanted do more.  So we moved it to our products pages to explain our products and services, followed up by a story. Another idea I had was to get our customers to do a video testimonial.  Instead of just getting the boring old letter.  We called our customers and found a couple that would be comfortable being on video, on our site.  Don’t take offense if a client says no.  Maybe they’re under Witness Protection, or maybe they just wouldn’t be comfortable doing that.  I was able to get the written testimonials from them so everything worked out ok. You could even do an audio interview and put a slide show in front of it.  The point is use more that words, pictures………pretty pictures.

Interaction!

You should also encourage interaction on your site.  You need to at least have a comment page.  People need to be able to interact with you directly from the site.  Don’t have any required fields either.  Leave it open.  You will get more feedback if you don’t demand an e-mail or even a name.  Another Idea could be to start a blog.  The reason you’re reading this right now is because I want to interact with you.  Your feed back to my products and ideas are priceless.  It also gives me the opportunity to reach out to new prospective clients that I could never reach any other way.  I’ll tell you a story.  Yesterday, I got a phone call from none other than Hubspot.  They read the first installment of this series and called to thank me for the positive mention.  They offered to give me some more tips for the site, tips I will pass along to you.   They offered to do this for free and you know I like free.  Who knows what can happen?  That’s part of the fun.

How do I start a blog?

We downloaded WordPress.  With this you can follow their step by step instructions and have a blog up in a matter of minutes.  But to be honest that’s the easy part.  The hard part is trying to figure out what you’re going write about.    Here’s a tip.  Write about what you know or something you are learning about.  The other thing is to dress your site up as much as you can.  The same things that apply to your website also apply to your blog site.  Once we got our information together and the site the way we wanted it we made our first post.  It was very exciting.  No one saw it.  The next thing we had to do was get the word out about our site.  We did a couple things to help with this.  For one we sent an e-mail to our friends, family and customers that we had a blog.  We encouraged them to check out the blog.  Another thing we did was sign up for accounts on Digg and Tecnnorati.  Here you can post your blog for the world to see.  Don’t get depressed if you’re not the next big thing on the Internet overnight.  We aren’t.  We just know that this will pay off in the end.

Just to keep updated on our marketing budget so far, $0.00.  “Them’s good numbers!”

In part 4 we will take a look at the response we’ve been getting and look deeper into Google Analytics.  See you then.