Last week I had the privilege of holding a business internet marketing workshop for 50 people with fellow SmartCompany blogger Lara Solomon and Marketing Angels’ Michelle Gamble in Sydney. The day showed just how comprehensively business barriers have fallen as cheap or free online services have given fast moving companies a huge competitive advantage.
This is true in marketing, as Michelle showed in her discussion about the overall branding of the business and Lara in covering the social media tools essential to an organisation seeking to get their message to the world. Tools and techniques that were once only available to the biggest corporations are now available to the small business.
Intellectual property is one of those areas where not too long ago few small businesses bothered to register a trademark, while today it’s one of the first things a new start-up does. Which was one of the things I discussed in my part of the presentation which I also covered on SmartCompany a couple of years ago in The rules of the name game.
The big change though is in capital expenditure — not so long ago the biggest items on a start-ups costs spreadsheet were the servers, desktops and network infrastructure.
Today, those costs have almost disappeared as the founders and early staff use their own computers or the company picks up some cheap notebooks or tablets and runs all of these services off the cloud. As long as the devices can handle a modern web browser, everything else is unnecessary cost.
Web hosting and internet plans too have become far cheaper. With most businesses being able to get a connection and an excellent hosting service for under $200 a month, many can do it for far less than that.
It’s a great time of opportunity for businesses, with an organisation’s website becoming the cornerstone of their operations and marketing, the barriers to smart people are falling rapidly. It’s time to get your ideas out there.
For more Tech Talk blogs, click here.
Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3,000 subscribers.
Smart Company is the leading online publication in Australia for free news, information and resources catering to Australia’s entrepreneurs, small and medium business owners and business managers.
