The New Southern Standard

How many free tools can you think of for promotion? I can ramble off 25 without pausing…

How many can you think of for operational improvements?

How many for project management?

How many for sales?

Here’s 3 of my favorites -

Gmail - free email service that holds about 6GBs of mail. That’s more than enough for anyone. Also, it can be configured to work with your current domain name, so you can send email to you@mycompany.whatever.

Google apps - Free online word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. Stop paying for expensive MS Word licenses. Most people in your office can get by with these apps.

Skype - Free VoIP phone calls. Use Skype to make calls over the Internet. The service is free if you call another Skype customer, and there is only a modest fee for calling landlines.

More lists for your business from Mashable.com -

35+ Ways to Find and Plan Events Online

Online Productivity Toolbox - 30+ Resources to Get Things Done

5000+ Resources to do just about anything online

How is your website performing?

Few business people realize every website has a built-in tracking mechanism. There is a log file tracking various metrics related to visitors and visits to the website. In the absence of a full-blown analysis, this log file can provide useful information.

If you are considering how to improve your web situation, this log file is the first place to look.

This topic is way too involved to give a full overview in one post. Here are a few examples of the information a log file provides:

Hits - This shows the number of server requests for any element on a page. Don’t bother with this number. Hits haven’t been important since 1998.

Pages - This is the number of pages that have been served from your site.

Unique visitors - This metric is used to count how many different people come to your site each day. It takes the IP address of each computer. So, should someone visit your site several times a day, they will only be counted once (which, by the way, is one of the problems with this metric).

Note to all: All of these metrics have caveats associated with them. The point of this post was to help bring awareness of the log file. More advance users will immediately understand the idiosyncrasies of the data.

If you answered never, or something that is over one week ago, you need to make it a priority and get it done within the next few days.

Prices for external storage are very affordable. A quick check on Amazon brings up a 1 Terabyte drive for a few hundred dollars.

( 1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes = 1,000,000 Megabytes )

The news for many Southern cities is great and will continue to get better.

Businesses in the South will be wise to sit up and realize the next step - new business begets new business. It’s a concept called ‘economic clustering.’

Simply, the commitments and growth already coming to the South will entice new business to enter the area. The new business will be industry suppliers, distributors, and all sorts of service companies. More on clustering is here and here. A specific study in San Diego on tech companies is here.

With all these new dollars coming to your town, what is the first thing new companies are going to do? That’s right - hit Google and search. No matter where they are located, Google is their first destination. From their chair in France, Germany, or Wisconsin -they are looking for information on your town and your company.

Here are the questions you should be asking yourself -

What happens when they search for my site?

Based on my results in the search, would I hire myself?

If the answer is ‘no,’ you should start moving your thoughts to focusing on this new business channel.

More analysis from the Forbes.com list -

There are several Southern cities on the list. More reason why people should sit up and take notice.

According to Forbes, the fastest growing Large cities in the U.S.

#1 - Austin, Texas

#2 - Cape Coral-Ft. Myers, Fla.

#3 - Atlanta, Ga.

#6 - Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas

#8 - Houston, Texas

#9 - Orlando, Fla.

#10 - Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Fla.

(7 out of 10 are in the South)

According to Forbes, the fastest growing Small Cities in the U.S.

#1 - Mobile, Ala.

#2 - Texarkana, Texas/Ark.

#3 - Palm Coast, Fla.

#4 - Huntsville, Ala.

#6 - Auburn-Opelika, Ala.

#8 - Port St. Lucie, Fla.

#9 - Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss.

#10 - Naples-Marco Island, Fla.

(8 out of 10 are in the South)

On the latest Forbes.com list - Mobile, AL. is listed as the #1 Fastest Growing Small Metro Area

Link: Forbes.com - America’s Fastest-Growing Metros

Great news for Mobile!