Are you tracking the mentions that your company gets on websites, blogs, and online news sources?  Tracking online mentions is a fantastic way to quickly understand what the public as a whole is responding to about your business.  The problem is that most PR tracking software is downright expensive!

One of the most well known tools around today for tracking online mentions and the impact of press releases is Vocus (which partnered with online PR giant PR Web within the last year).  The cost for this software?  Nearly $10,000. 

While there is no question that this is very comprehensive software with lots of bells and whistles, but do you really need all that functionality with such a hefty price tag?  You may prefer different types of functionality than Vocus provides.

The key to getting the results you want is to ask the questions that are right for your business.  Why would it be important to track the mentions of your business online?  What other factors would you like to track (such as the results of pages written by particular copywriters or complaints and raves about products from various manufacturers)?  Perhaps you’d like to know which mentions generated the most traffic and conversions so that you can better plan your marketing and promotional strategy.

Perhaps you’d be better informed and spend less with a custom application.  The best thing about having custom software built is that you get all of what you want and pay for none of what you don’t want. 

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The reason just about everyone in the world is enamored by Google is because of their innovative web apps that make life a whole lot easier. Google is constantly cooking up something new and innovative in their top-secret labs. Take a look at some of their latest that you may not have heard about.

Google Timelines

Google Timelines is part of their Experimental Search project. By adding view:timeline to any search, you can now get a visual about the dates most commonly referenced in connection with your search term. Perhaps it’s not something that everyone needs, but I would venture to guess that the people who do will be sold on using Google.

Local Voice Search

Wow! With local voice search, you can call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and speak the name of the listing or category you’re looking for, then get connected to the business for free or have the results sent by SMS to your cell.

Google Notebook

Keep a little virtual notebook of things you find on the web without leaving your browser. Take a tour of Google Notebook »

You can find lots more of Google’s awesome web apps at their Google Labs page.

All of this success begs the question… what kind of web apps could you create to make your website more sticky? What would make the lives of your customers easier? There are literally hundreds of great ideas waiting to be developed.

If you’re in a niche industry, you’re the perfect person to come up with a great idea that your target audience or peers need. Maybe you’ve already got an idea. If so, look us up. Chances are, it’s a lot simpler and more affordable to create than you might imagine…

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A press release published by the OPEN from American Express talks about a recent study that says 81% of small business owners are satisfied with the amount of leisure time they get.  Are you one of them?  These stats seem a little off-base – unless I just happen to know only the 19% of other small business owners that are constantly juggling work-related activities. 

Forget about becoming more productive in your business so that you can grow your business for a second… shouldn’t we also be striving for more enjoyment from our lives?  That’s one of the reasons why you went into business for yourself, isn’t it?

Take a moment and think about all of the repetitive things that you do each day that are taking way to much time.  If you’re doing the same task over and over, there is almost certainly a way to automate it and free up a good chunk of your time.  What are you doing that’s wasting your precious leisure time?

Even if you don’t know how you would automate it, there is probably a way with custom software.  Developers can look at a problem from an entirely different angle and often see quick solutions that the person doing the task hasn’t considered.  I don’t mean to make a sales pitch here, but isn’t freeing up some of your valuable time worth considering building a custom software app? 

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Most of our readers are small to mid-sized business owners that have to make tough choices about doing things themselves or hiring a professional. You probably want to save the hiring of a professional for complicated tasks like software development or specialists like attorneys and accountants.

For all the stuff in between, Sclipo is a cool new video tutorial site that we found where you can watch and upload all kinds of different “how to” videos for free. In addition to learning how to create video email, watermark your photos, or create different Photoshop effects, you can also go outside of the computers/business category and learn how to do all kinds of miscellaneous things like how to open a beer bottle with paper or moonwalk.

What do you want to learn today?

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There are a lot of prepackaged software solutions on the market today, but no company is exactly like your business.  Oftentimes, conforming to prepackaged software means not being as innovative as you’d like to be with your information.   Here are 3 software solution ideas that you can have customized precisely to fit your business that are designed to improve ROI, streamline processes, and drive your business ahead. 

Performance Management Tools

How do you evaluate your employees?  It’s likely that your measurements are unique to your company.  The way a business decides to set its goals and metrics, and their ability to track these goals and metrics, ultimately determines success.  A custom software program that allows you set and track the progress of employee goals effectively can help individuals work at their peak performance, which in turn helps your company succeed in its big-picture goals. 

Training Assessment and Tracking

How much better could your team perform as a whole if all of your employees consistently received advanced-level training?  Leadership skills, organizational skills, goal setting skills can all move your business light years ahead.  With so much training and so many employees, companies need a way to assess and track progress on an individual level and as a whole.  Using customizes software, you can create computer-based assessments and store results in a single database.

Customer Relations Software

A CRM does much more than just managing customer information – it allows you to understand how various pieces of your business are affecting each other.  Instead of building a CRM from scratch, we recommend using SalesForce.com’s platform.  This highly advanced platform requires some technical setup, but allows for so much customization that it’s like building your own personalized CRM from scratch. 

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