I’ll be speaking on Ecommerce this Thursday December 14 at the Entrepreneur Center of the SBDC TAP (Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program, 84 W. Santa Clara St - downtown San Jose 95113)

The holiday party starts at 6pm and will include:

• 15 Minute Technology Demonstrations on Mobility, Ecommerce, Finance, VoIP
• Valuable door prizes
• FREE online subscription to Small Business Technology Magazine
• Networking with Leading Technology Consultants and Local Small Business Entrepreneurs

Register online here
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Every quarter I teach an Online Marketing Course for the Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program (SBDC TAP). It is not an online marketing course, but rather a real life course about online marketing - about how to promote your site on the Internet.
I try to make it as practical as possible, with a lot of “live” examples where we analyse websites and techniques (there is an Internet connection so we can go to actual sites in real time). We cover Search Engine Optmization, content creation, the importance of keywords, setting up an AdWord campaign (Search Engine Marketing) and more. It's a bargain at $25!

Here are the upcoming dates and locations for my course for the Third Quarter of 2006:

Sep 14 5:00-8:00 PM
San Jose – San Jose Entrepreneur Center, 84 W. Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113

Sep 26 5:30-8:30 PM
Oakland – Cal State East Bay SBDC Training Center – 1000 Broadway, Suite 109, Oakland, CA 94607

You can register online too.

UPDATE - THESE COURSES HAVE BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE MOVED TO THE FALL

Hope to see some of you there!

I've been teaching an Online Marketing Course for the Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program (SBDC TAP) since 2005. The course is subsidized by the Small Business Administration and costs $25 for 3 hours.

Here are the upcoming dates and locations for my course for the Second Quarter of 2006:

May 2 5:00-8:00 PM
San Francisco – San Francisco Entrepreneur Center – 455 Market St. 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

May 10 2:30-5:30 PM
Oakland – Cal State East Bay SBDC Training Center – 1000 Broadway, Suite 109, Oakland, CA 94607

June 5 5:00-8:00 PM
San Jose – San Jose Entrepreneur Center, 84 W. Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113

You can register online.

There are many other courses offered at very good rates:

• Small Office Computer Networking Made Simple
• Smart Tools to Manage Your Small Business Finances
• Successful Business Contacts Management with MS Outlook
• Technology Tools to Succeed in the Retail Business
• Web Fundamentals and eCommerce Principles

Maybe I'll get to meet some of you there!

Some logos from thelogocompany.net: creative and cheap

There are many affordable ways to get a corporate identity. Wired Magazine recently conducted a test of some cheap logo providers. They invented a company and asked online shops to create a logo for them. Unfortunately the online version of the article Grading the logo shops does not show the logos they came up with.

The top 3 were these (all comments are from Wired):

- The Logo Company
Service: Three business days; $75. Fast and easy. Ordering was a breeze, and they gave us four decent, relevant designs.
[You can see examples of their work here on the left.]
Grade: B+

- The Logo Loft
Service: Four business days and four options; $99. Sue, the customer service rep, called - called! - to clarify our order.
Grade: B
UPDATE 4/07: A client has had a negative experience with this company recently

- Logo Design Creation
Service: Overnight; $69. Placed the order at the end of one day and got three logos to choose from the next morning. Hey, we are living in the future!
Grade: B-

Gotlogos which I mentioned in the post Making small business look big, cheaply, only got a C+ because

Can't call customer service. Charged an extra $50 for a hi-res digital file of our logo.

There was a special small business section in Thursday Feb 22 NYTimes, with an article about how to make your (small) business have the external appearance of being at least middle-sized. I can't link to it because the NYTimes charges for articles more than a week old, so I'll give you a summary right here.

For logos, gotlogos.com creates one for you for $25. I checked them out and they are pretty decent.

UPDATE: More on logos in the post How to Get a Cheap Logo for your Business

For business cards, Vistaprint charges $40 for 500. I've used them in the past and would recommend them.

For colleague communication (the virtual water cooler), there is office.com. I don't have any personal experience with them, but they do have a free trial with collaborative calendars, reminders, address books and the like.

For a professional-sounding phone system, the $695 TalkSwitch 24 PBX from Centerpoint Technologies is recommended. This strikes me as the kind of thing which costs thousands not so long ago.

Finally, there was no web design recommendation, so I thought I'd add my one. There is a company called no diamonds web services which apparently does pretty good work…

Blogging is perhaps the most effective marketing tool a small business or consultant has. Here's why:

- search engines love blogs and they immediately increase traffic to the website (100% increases within month is common)

- you can establish a reputation as an authority in your field

- blogs allow for instant feedback through the conversations with readers made possible via the commenting system

From a Wall Street Journal article of March 1 '05:

blogs with character are seen as more effective than some more traditional online-marketing strategies, such as static, brochurelike Web sites and electronic newsletters that may get blocked by spam filters

And from Lee Lefever of commoncraft (the blog of a Social Design Consultant):

Businesses are finding that the most effective way to communicate to the market is by giving employees and customers the opportunity to interact informally on the web [...] businesses are learning to communicate like people instead of businesses

Stoneyfield Farms is a nice example of a business adopting blogs. And it's good yogurt too, my kids love it. Here's their blog The Bovine Bugle, which chronicles daily life on a family farm in Franklin, Vermont, one of the company's organic milk suppliers.