aerodesigns » Business Productivity

SpeedRead to Increase Productivity

admin — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:46:57 +0000

Most of us spend a great deal of time reading, whether it be a blog, emails, articles, or news releases. Reading can occupy quite a lot of your time without you realising it - even if you only spend one hour per day reading, that adds up to a lot of

Save Time Writing Emails With Texter

admin — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:05:27 +0000

I’ve just discovered a handy (and best of all free) text replacement application which will help to save you time if you regularly type similar text. It’s called Texter, and is available completely free to download. For anybody who answers a la

Small Businesses Shouldn’t Be Afraid To Say ‘No’

admin — Tue, 08 May 2007 08:27:00 +0000

Many small businesses would think you're crazy if you asked them whether they turned down business. In the first few years of trading, most small business owners chase or say yes to any business they can find - irrespective of whether they have to va

Top 5 Productivity Enhancing Ideas For Busy People

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:40:06 +0000

Due to my workload starting to reach a critical mass in the last few weeks, productivity and increasing my efficiency has been a hot topic for me recently. There are always different aspects in life, whether it be personal or business, that can be o

Increase Cold Calling Productivity With Skype

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:43:34 +0000

Not only is Skype useful for the day to day calls made as part of your business, it also has an even more powerful application whereby it can increase the productivity of your cold calling - particularly if you are a large volume user. Certain featur

Time Management: Turning Your Computer Into An Employee! Using Software to Automate Tasks and Free Up Your Time!

admin — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:47:06 +0000

If you run a small business then I’m sure you’re aware of all the day-to-day tasks that eat into your time and hence your bottom line. A 5-minute email here, a 10 minute application form there, before you know it these tasks mount up and you’re

How To Can Spam :: Spam Prevention Techniques

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:35:50 +0000

One of the major productivity-harming features of email is ‘spam’ – basically unsolicited bulk email that comes in a variety of forms on a scale of just annoying to downright disgusting. Unfortunately in this day and age it seems that no matter

Increase Business Productivity For Free!

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 12:41:02 +0000

Well surprise surprise, the corporate giant that is Google is unveiling free tools at a rate of knots. In addition to the features useful for our personal lives such as Gmail, Book search and finding your house on Google Earth, Google has also launched a variety of free tools which can potentially be very useful for small businesses.

If you don’t yet have a sturdy webmail system for your business domain name (eg: yourbusiness.co.uk) then AeroDesigns can offer corporate strength Microsoft Exchange hosting, but if you don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with Exchange, then you should think about using the free Google Mail Apps service. With this service you can have up to 100 mailboxes (or more if you negotiate) at a whopping 2Gb per box! These email addresses are configured so that they appear from your own domain name and you can administer all your employees email accounts from your Admin panel.

You can find all the new applications over at the Google “About” Page.

So what kind of new features are available? Well if you’re not familiar with the Gmail standard, you sort emails according to a label you give them rather than into folders, this takes a bit of getting used to but has definitely got a shallow learning curve with all the tips and tutorials they offer. You can also link up with their other free tools such as Google Calendar (which you can set to send free SMS text messages to your mobile phone as reminders to events), and Google Docs which allows you to share and collaborate on documents with other employees online.

Google Mail Apps also allows you to store the details of all your contacts in an easily accessible and searchable format. If you use Skype regularly (particularly SkypeOut and SkypeIn) then you can also download a Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer which highlights telephone numbers that you can call just by clicking on. So to sum up, if you use Google Mail to store your contacts and use Skype, then you just have to navigate to your contact and click their number and Skype will call them for you without having to type the number in. I’d highly recommend Skype for small business users as they offer really cheap landline calls and personally I have found the call quality to be perfect when using broadband (even 512Kb).