My wife and I started a web development company back in June of this past year 2007. In doing so we sought out using open source applications to help us run our business from the beginning to help us save money. Using open source software rather than proprietary software would enable us to keep as low of an overhead as possible. In searching for alternatives to open source software (paid software) that could actually benefit our business and what we are doing, it was striking to find out how much money we could have been spending. I won’t waste my time and explain to you the paid software applications we were interested in purchasing. But rather, I will share with you what open source applications we have been able to use instead saving us an estimated about of $100,000 and counting. I say counting because unfortunately most paid software programs find a way to come out with new versions every year so that you can be charged yet again.

The List Looks Like This

For our website = Drupal Content Management System

For our Documentation = MediaWiki

For our Operating Systems = Fedora Linux Operating System

For our Weblog = Wordpress

For our Email Clients = Mozilla Thunderbird

For our Calendars = Mozilla Sunbird

For our Shopping Cart = Zen Cart

For our CRM = Sugar CRM

For our Accounting = GnuCash

For our Social Network = Elgg

For our Web Based Email = Squirrel Mail

For our Helpdesk = Cerberus

For our Document Mgmt. = KnowledgeTree

For our Timeclock = PHP Timeclock

For our office productivity = OpenOffice

The last thing we configured in was our web hosting costs. Because of open source software our Bluehost account is only costing us $6.95/month for 1,500 GB of hosting space and 15 TB of transfer. This alone, because we are a web business is saving us a ton of money!

Through costs of software, and also development costs to build some of these tools, we estimated that our company was able to save $100,000 because of these open source applications. Can you say Wow! I am in no way counting in what these applications have made for us thus far. That would be an entirely different number. This is just money saved. That’s it.

How is this possible? It’s possible because of all the good people out there who believe that open source should exist. What’s surprising to me is that many companies still continue to live in ignorance of these wonderful tools. I want to know how much money you have saved due to open source! Please leave your comment and share with us your numbers. Thanks

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Janet Meiners recently wrote a very helpful article on Marketing Pilgrim about what customers want. She pulled information from two different survey sources on how online customers want more detailed product descriptions. As obvious as this may sound, it’s very rare to find an e-commerce website these days with very detailed product descriptions. It seems today that many online entrepreneurs have a “short attention span” and are not spending the time and energy to give each product description the attention and care it deserves. Here is a striking stat:

79 percent of those surveyed “rarely or never” purchase a product without complete product information.
- the e-tailing group

This data comes from the WebCollage’s 2007 Survey of Online Consumer Product Research Habits. What does this stat tell you? It says that if you do not give better product descriptions and information, then your potential customer will leave your website and purchase somewhere else. In the survey the people were asked, Which of the following pieces of information are useful to you when researching a product for purchase?

• Detailed product benefits and capabilities: 67%
• System requirements: 61%
• List of items that are included with the product: 61%
• Comparison of different models: 58%
• Product Documentation/Warranty Information: 51%
• A manufacturer’s overview of the product: 48%
• List of new features for this product model: 45%
• List of compatible accessories: 44%
• Larger or alternate product images: 31%
• Product tours or demos: 27%
• Other: 9%

This is some seriously great and valuable information that everybody online who runs an e-commerce store should know. Shoppers said they spent a full 8 minutes reading product descriptions. Images, content, descriptions, reviews etc. All of those included add up to be a full 8 minute presentation of your product to the consumer. Make sure you take advantage of this and give as much helpful information as possible. Be patient in your creation of your product descriptions. Review them regularly. And add to them or change them as you find necessary. Doing so will make you more profitable online.

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Hitwise has released it’s search engine numbers for the month of March 2007. In these numbers you will find a 10% increase for Google over the other 3 major search engines. You can find out more about the article at Hitwise: Search Engine Stats. Here is a basic rundown of those numbers.

• Google = 64.13%
• Yahoo = 21.26%
• MSN Live = 9.15%
• Ask = 3.48%

This information is helpful for a couple of reasons. For one, it shows Google’s true dominance over the search engine market and why for organic search engine optimization it’s so important to put Google on the top of your list of priorities. It does however also show that you don’t necessarily need to fully depend on Google only for your traffic. Nick Stamoulis wrote about how if traffic can be sustained by 2 out of the 3 other search engines that you can be well off as well.

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For all business professionals marketing themselves is a vital part of life. Whether you are a business owner or even a teacher, your ability to “market” yourself allows you to take advantage of opportunities that others are unable to capitalize on. The Internet has and is continuing to provide us with the perfect tools to allow us to do this effectively and efficiently. Many people know these tools as Social Networking Tools.

Starting with MySpace and now Facebook, social networking has become an everyday language for many people across the world. But these sites have not only proven to be valuable for dating purposes, but for business purposes as well. Thank you Linkedin.com for helping us understand that we can build social networks through the web of business professionals. But how many of us professionals have an account with some of these main social networks? How many of us capitalize on these tools not for dating, but for business? Every business professional needs to have a profile on at least 1 of the 2 main networks being MySpace and Facebook. And every business pro must have a profile with Linkedin.com.

Don’t believe me? Try doing a Google search for a person you know. Chances are that if they are on the internet at all, it’s probably a facebook or myspace page that it links to. Do a search for my name on Google and you will see Facebook and Linkedin pages that point to me. I call this having a Personal Professional Presence on the web. For example, if you are a small business owner you are probably marketing your company pretty heavily on the web. Building websites, sharing business cards with your website address on them etc. What you must realize is that not only does your company have marketability, you do as a person as well. Sometimes you as a person have more market capability than your company does. For example if you are a Dentist, you have the incredible ability to market yourself to your patients in many many ways. Many times Dentists don’t even have logos or practice names at all. Ever seen a dentist office where the name of the practice is the name of the dentist? That’s because marketing yourself in the dental industry is critical. People need a dentist they can trust.

So with all that said go start “eProfile” right away and stay on top of it. You can start by using the following sites:

• MySpace.com
• Facebook.com
• Linkedin.com

And I have to put in a plug for my own project that I have put together. And that is Realedin which is a social network for real estate professionals. We are all involved in Real Estate in one way or the other. This tool has been designed to help people build a network of real estate professionals they can trust and communicate to no matter where in the world for advice, information, resources etc. Good luck and enjoy your social networking profile experience.

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You’ve heard or may have used Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets, and now you are probably hearing about Google’s new endeavor, Google Presentations. Google has just recently released their Google Presentations to compete with Microsoft Powerpoint presentation giving you the ability to create, edit, and save your presentations online. I personally am a huge fan of Google Docs and Spreadsheets and am very excited to use their spreadsheets. For me it’s very valuable to save my documents online and be able to access them from anywhere.

So check out Google Presentations today and see if you like it. You should definetly be using Google’s online tools for you business if you are not already. They are extremely beneficial and will help you boost your productivity. I currently use Google search like most people, but I also use Google Reader, Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, and Calendar for my personal and business productivity. All these tools really help me out in what I do and I think they will help you too.

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OpenEMM is an open source industrial enterprise software for email marketing. This is a fantastic tool to use for mass email marketing campaigns due to it’s simple interface and complex features. This software does a lot of things for you. At least from what I can read it does. I have not actually used it myself yet. It’s in my plans to install it on one of my servers sometime in the near future. I personally don’t do a lot of mass email campaigns myself but you may. In that case you will find this very helpful. Read up more on OpenEMM and it’s features by going to the features page. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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