Anand Rajaram, OfficeDrop’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer, has just completed a list of tips and tools we used here during our recent website redesign to improve visitor conversion. You can see the entire list of his articles on the Performable blog.
Optimizing Conversion Rates Part One – Quantitative Tests
When you start your small business, one of your first tasks is to get some business cards printed! But, how should you do this – use one of the many print-on-demand websites like Vistaprint? Or do it yourself with your printer by purchasing a DIY kit from someone like Staples?
Sara Morgan, small business consultant and author of the No Limits blog has written a helpful piece just on this decision. If you are going to be purchasing business cards (or other things like custom printed stationary) for your business you should read her list of pros and cons. Read “The Pros and Cons of DIY Printing“.
And, of course, after you’ve done all that printing you can send it off to OfficeDrop to get it digitized!
Ivana Taylor, CEO of Third Force Marketing, will be holding a free webinar on using online video for boosting sales. Ivana also runs DIYMarketers, and is an expert on small business marketing strategies. OfficeDrop is not affiliated with this webinar, but we think a large number of our small business clients may find it useful!
“In this SBTV.COM and DIY Marketers presentation, “Quick Start Guide to Using Video to Market Your Business”, you’ll learn how to create low-cost professional quality internet video that will put your company in the spotlight.”
DIYMarketers, a resource for CEOs looking for affordable marketing tips, published a piece by Healy Jones (i.e. OfficeDrop’s Marketing department), called “5 Tips for a More Professional Website.”
We learned a lot when we relaunced our website, and these are some of the key ideas we used when we remodeled the OfficeDrop home page. Hopefully some other small businesses will find these tips helpful!
At OfficeDrop, we’ve noticed more and more visitors coming to our site who’ve searched for the word “cloud.” But since the cloud has so many meanings to so many people, we’d thought we’d explain how we see small businesses taking advantage of the power of cloud computing to get more out of their paper and digital documents. Our understanding of how businesses use the cloud is rapidly evolving as we grow!
Connecting Cloud Services
More and more, we are seeing the benefits of the cloud in terms of connecting data to other services. Paper no longer has to be stuck in a silo’ed document management service, but can instead be accessed and shared with other software via a cloud filing cabinet. Data can be pushed from one place into another to take advantage of unique technologies – like Evernote’s amazing mobile clients or FreshBooks’ unique invoicing software. (OfficeDrop has recently released an API to allow other software developers to build off of our document scanning service and digital filing system/digital office.) Cloud content management makes this all possible.
Cloud computing is great for small businesses for a number of reasons. As we mentioned in our blog post, “An Introduction to Cloud Computing for Small Business Owners:”
“Cloud computing is a platform for accessing and utilizing your businesses IT via the internet. This means nearly all of your IT resources – your servers, data storage, software/ programs – are hosted on the internet. It used to be that all of your computing would have to be done by your own servers, hardwired to your business. Now that the internet is around, your servers don’t have to be hardwired, and you don’t even need to have your own. Instead, you can rent server space from anywhere in the country from people like Amazon, who have already paid the overhead. Utilizing this system with SaaS, which does the same thing with software, one could theoretically run an entire business from various cyber cafés (if those still exist) without purchasing any of their own personal hardware or software at all.”
OfficeDrop continues to learn more and more about how small business owners want to interact with the cloud (and their data!) When we first founded the company 3 years ago (wow, that’s a long time) we thought that web browsers would be the favorite way for users to access their data. But we were wrong. With the success of our downloadable apps, we’ve noticed something pretty amazing: Business owners like to use applications to visit the cloud, not browsers.
As our cloud scanning software app, ScanDrop, continues to take off and since our iPad “paper to go” app was in the top 10 business ipad applications in itunes, we’ve realized that apps are a great way to interact with the cloud.
OfficeDrop Free App Downloads
And by “realized” we mean that our customers made it clear that they like apps!
Our CEO, Prasad, has been busy training some of our web developers in desktop programming, and our CTO, Vik, has dusted off his Objective-C skills for our Mac versions.
We will have a new way to interact with our cloud digital filing service from the desktop soon for Windows users. And Mac users will soon be able to scan to the cloud just like their PC friends.
We are also busy working on creating workflow specific desktop/cloud solutions for paper intensive industries, starting with accountants and bookkeepers. We just did the first demonstration of our new bookkeeping software, which was very well received, and hope to enroll beta users toward the end of the month. This software will connect the popular QuickBooks software with paper in a number of powerful ways: from the scanner, desktop and cloud. Let us know if you are interested in trying this service!
We are having a ton of fun here at OfficeDrop, helping business owners harness the power of cloud computing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten the importance of actually speaking with customers. Give us a call at 888-674-6493 if you ever want to chat about getting your paper and filing cabinets into the cloud!
I’m sure you remember how we changed our name a few months ago, and how we shared the way we came up with the new one. Now, all of that handy name-changing info is hosted on the entrepreneur section of About.com
About.com is an awesome resource to learn about almost anything. The article is part of a set that share the theme of crowdsourcing. Mainly how to effectively use crowdsourcing to the benefit of your company. Since we did a lot of crowdsourcing of employees and customers to change our name, we offered our story to About.com writer, Mitchell York, who was happy to include our input. We were happy to contribute by sharing our knowledge and experience to create a guide for changing your company name, and are honored to be featured on About.com Crowdsourcing was a big help for us in getting this done, and we encourage any business owners to look into crowdsourcing for various business tasks.
Thanks go out to Mitchell York for getting us on there, and for providing great content for entrepreneurs on About.com!
OfficeDrop is teaming up with organizational mastermind, Josh Zerkel, to bring you two free webinars to teach you how to go paperless and keep all of your documents organized. For seven years Josh’s company, Custom Living Solutions, has been helping people optimize their workspaces so that they can lower stress, be more effective, and minimize costs.
With this single registration, you’re signed up to benefit from these two informative webinars:
In this webinar we outline the many benefits of the paperless office and tell you how to get started.
In the second webinar, we let you know how to get the most out of your paperless office, how to maintain low paper volume, and offer helpful tools to make everything easier.
If you manage a small business or home office, don’t pass up on this opportunity to learn everything you need to know about reducing paper and staying organized. Registration only takes a moment, so we hope you take that moment and that you join us July 15th and 29th.
Going paperless can certainly make things easier for you and your employees, but you aren’t the only one who benefits from a paperless office. Just as your life becomes easier by reducing paper, so will the lives of your clients. Here are a few ways reducing paper and going digital will generate benefits that your clients will thank you for.
Faster Responses
When it comes to resolving client issues, there’s a negative correlation between customer mood and time taken for resolution. Oftentimes, the answers to client questions depend on the location of a paper document, and it used to be that clients had to wait while you rifled through filing cabinets for their answer. In the paperless office digital documents can be searched and retrieved instantly. Going paperless lets you locate documents quickly, and a faster reaction to client needs will always be appreciated.
They Get Anywhere Access
Clients like to stay informed; sharing a collection of digital documents with clients will build trust and make them feel valued. Digital documents can be hosted online, so they’re accessible anywhere your client can find a connection.
Less Clutter
It sounds obvious, but going paperless lets you maintain client relations without sending them stacks of physical documents. Doing business online will save your clients’ desks from excess clutter and make them grateful that they work with your paperless business.
They Feel Safe
Once you can boast the enhanced security features of online document storage, your clients will be reassured knowing that their information is backed up, firewalled, and securely guarded in state-of-the-art data facilities. Not only does this make you look good, but you and your client can sleep easy without nightmares of lost or destroyed paper documents.
They Become Environmentalists
The paperless office certainly has “green” values, and more and more people are becoming environmentally conscious. Knowing that they work with a paperless company will make clients feel good about working with you and good about themselves.
So do yourself and your clients a favor and send documents to us. We do all the scanning, leaving you and your associates to enjoy the security and convenience of reducing paper and managing documents online.
We’re proud to announce today that OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, will be a guest on radio show, Greenwich Entrepreneur, on AM1490WGCH, The Voice of Fairfield and Westchester Counties.
The show airs at 9:30am tomorrow morning and Prasad will be discussing entrepreneurship & starting companies with host and OfficeDrop customer, Greg Skidmore, President of Belray Asset Management.
For those of you interested in startups companies and getting a new business going, we hope you tune in to hear Prasad’s entrepreneurial insight. To tune in from your computer, just follow this link, or you can visit http://wgch.com/showarchive/ge.shtml and hit the “Listen Live” button.
We’ll be tuned in rooting for Prasad here in the office and we hope you enjoy the show too. Special thanks to Greg Skidmore for having Prasad on the show and for scanning your documents with OfficeDrop!
OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni has been writing some pieces for Small Business Trends, sharing his experiences as a small business owner and providing advice for making your small business more productive.
Last time he wrote about the iPad for small business, and now he’s back with a brand new post on free desktop applications that are perfect for small biz.
In the post he lists some great desktop apps that can help with the following small business concerns:
Be sure to check out the full post to see all of the great applications that can supercharge your small business after a quick free download.
In addition to offering advice on Small Business Trends, Prasad has also contributed a small business tech tip to the No Limits Blog, a site making technology more accessible to small businesses. His tip outlines a cheap service for a live chat feature.
We hope you find Prasad’s insights helpful, and congrats Prasad on helping support the small business community.
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