We're Moving

FozTech will be moving from blogger to wordpress over the next few days.

You can now find us @ www.foztech.wordpress.com.

Must Have Online Tools for Small Business

Bloomtools provides a list of the latest "must haves" for growing your small business. Best of all, most them are free!

A functional website

Is your website up-to-date and a true reflection of your business strengths? Do your customers get value from it? Does it actively get results for your business? If not, then you are missing out on the value that many businesses are gaining from the internet. Find a developer that can identify what will work for your business online. They need to supply you with a simple content management system so you can easily update the site yourself, a variety of features like a shopping cart and a photo gallery that can be added to the site at any time and, most importantly, reliable ongoing support.

Email marketing

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has a return on investment of almost $50 for every dollar spent. It is a must-have for anyone that is serious about growing their business, particularly in these quiet times because it is so cost-effective. Newsletters, promotions, event invitations, welcome letters and numerous other strategies work really well with email marketing because it’s highly targeted, personalised and easy to measure results. Look for an email marketing system that can integrate with your website and has in-built spam compliance and reporting capabilities.

Google Analytics

Ever wondered how many people come to your site and where they come from? Your site should generate basic statistics on its own, but you can find that out a lot more with Google Analytics. To set it up, simply sign up for a free account, put the tracking code on your website and you’re good to go. Analytics measures how many visits your site gets, how long users spend there, what pages they look at and much more. You can also also set up ‘goals’ to find out how many achieve a certain objective on the site, such as buy something or fill out your contact form. Visit www.google.com/analytics for more information.

Facebook

Facebook was a country, it would have the world’s 8th largest population, with more than 150 million members, so it’s definitely worth getting your business on it. Set up a profile for your business and use it to communicate with your customers in a creative way – promote your products, list your events, upload pictures and create online discussions. There are also paid advertising options on Facebook as well, which can be a very valuable option if your target consumers are social networking users. Being on Facebook will be one of the biggest marketing trends of the year, so jump on board now. Check out www.facebook.com for more information.

Looking for a Better Web Browser?

In addition to better security, even more good news about Firefox and Google Chrome.

From CNET: Google Chrome and Firefox speeds blow past IE, Opera

And for those of you already addicted to Twitter, you can now "tweet" your MP3's.

Download and Print Our Holiday Coupon

(click the image to download and print)

Holiday Gift Guide

The folks at PCMag have put together another useful gift guide for the holiday season, with an amazing deal on a new ThinkPad notebook. Check it out:

Save up to 45% on select ThinkPad notebooks thru December 19th
and get Free Shipping. (Use ecoupon code USPDSAVEDEC to get the Savings Today!)

Call 1-877-67THINK
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Holiday Gift Guide

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Gifts from $100-$500
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Gifts from $500-$1000
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Gifts from $1000-$1500
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MSN Messenger Virus Spreading Quickly

A warning for MSN Messenger users from eWeek:

A Trojan is introducing malware into thousands of computer systems worldwide, and the number is growing by the hour.

The malware is being introduced by MSN Messenger files posing as pictures, mostly seeming to come from known acquaintances.

The files are a new type of Trojan that has snared several thousand PCs for a bot network within hours of its launch earlier on Nov. 18 and is being used to discover VNCs—remote PC connections—as a means of increasing its growth vector.

[...] The Trojan is an IRC bot that's spreading through MSN Messenger by sending itself in a .zip file with two names. One of the names includes the word "pics" as a double extension executable—a name generally used by scanners and digital cameras: for example, DSC00432.jpg.exe. The Trojan is also contained in a .zip file with the name "images" as a .pif executable—for example, IMG34814.pif.

FozTech Anniversary Celebration

To celebrate our 3 year anniversary, we'd like to show our appreciation for valued customers.

Keep an eye on your inbox through October and November for more information about pricing discounts and give-aways, including a complete home desktop PC package, coupons, drawings for free business services, and more.

If you are not currently on our mailing list, and would like to be, provide your email address via the "Contact Us" link to the right.