Category: Uncategorized

Staying in touch with your current or potential clients is more important than ever.  Whether it’s communicating new hours of operation, changes in accessing your offices, or any other news about your business is crucial.  However, sending out a newsletter or marketing campaign correctly, and making sure the intended audience is reached, are even more important.  

Based on my research, as well as personal experience with my own clients, I’ve discovered that most people will mark your newsletter or email campaign as spam – rather than unsubscribe – even if they signed up for it (and liked it at one time).  As well, the dead addresses in your distribution lists might be re-animated by GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail in order to catch spammers who still have those addresses in a database.   

One way to fix this is to sign up with both Outlook.com and GMail in
order to claim, or vouch for the legitimacy of your domain. You can register through Gmail to validate your identity, as well as to learn how you can better control your email blasts to ensure that fewer of them end up in the oubliette.

Both these linked articles below are from email marketing companies, but they offer plenty of good advice for people doing a lot of email marketing:

How Spam Filters Work (And How to Stop Emails Going to Spam) [ca. 2018]

Where Do Boring Marketing Emails Go to Die?  [ca. 2016]

This post is meant for informational purposes, but as always, I’m here to support you. Please call me if you would like to discuss the best email campaign options for you and your business.  

Andy

Due to the majority of my client support work now being done remotely, I have been forced to change my billing procedures.  For phone support, I previously only charged for calls longer than 15-minutes.  I will now begin billing for phone support after 5-minutes.  Client phone support billing will now be in 5-minute increments instead of 15-minute.  And, any support requiring remote access will be billable from start of call.  Thank you for your understanding of these changes.  Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns.

On another note, I spent some time this weekend on the phone with Comcast to better understand the ways in which they (and other utilities) are helping their customers during the Covid crisis.  My rep at Comcast has helped his small business clients move to smaller office spaces, reduce broadband service levels to cut costs, and has even waived early-termination penalties for business that needed to stop their services altogether.  If you’re interested in learning more, send me an email or call me directly to discuss, as I can offer some good advice on lowering your monthly bill, as well as who to contact at Comcast.

I also have many tools for remote access and remote control support. I recently setup Zoom for my grandma in her farmhouse in rural Wisconsin so she could get more company from distant relatives – all by remote control. If you have family needing tech help, let me know and I can arrange for it!  

This newsletter is meant for informational purposes, but as always, I’m here to support you – especially during these challenging times.  Please call me if you would like to discuss the best options for you and your business to continue to successfully work remotely, and best utilize my services.  

Andy

I know it is exhausting to be constantly viligant about emails, but sometimes you can fall victim to a scam or virus even from trusted senders. 

Unfortunately, it is becoming all too common that you or your business might be sent an invoice, letter or invitation via email – possibly to be listed in a bogus directory, pay an invoice, or to renew your website domain name – that is really a phishing scam.These scams take advantage of the fact the person handling the administrative duties for the business may not know whether any vendor purchases, advertising or promotional activities may have actually been requested.

Many email-based ransomware scams use fake invoices as attachments to infect your computer. As an example, if you receive an unexpected bill from a utility provider, do not open the attachment.  

Using information they have obtained by hacking your computer systems, a scammer posing as one of your regular suppliers will tell you that their banking details have changed. They may tell you they have recently changed banks, and may use stolen letterhead and branding to convince you they are legitimate.

They will provide you with a new bank account number and ask that all future payments are processed accordingly. The scam is often only detected when your regular supplier asks why they have not been paid.Fake invitations will often include a form to be filled out, and ask for your business contact details with an approval signature. You might be led to believe that you are responding to an offer for a free entry, but the form you are asked to complete is a disguised invoice or contract with the amount owed hidden in tiny print.

Some things you can do to protect yourself and your business:

• Always check that goods or services were both ordered and delivered before paying an invoice, and always read the fine print carefully.
• Try to limit the number of people in your business who are authorised to make orders or pay invoices. Make sure the business billing you is the one you normally deal with.
• If you notice a supplier’s usual bank account details have changed, call them to confirm.
• If you receive a telephone call or ‘invoice’ that comes from a publication you have never heard of, do not pay or give out your details until you have looked into the matter further.
• Keep written records of your authorisations for advertising or directory entries. If you receive an invoice or a telephone call, you can go back to your records to check it.
• If you are happy with your current domain name registration provider, simply ignore any other ‘renewal’ or ‘registration’ letters that you may receive from a different company. If you do want to switch domain name registration providers—make sure you know the full costs, terms and conditions of the offer before agreeing.

Recently, one of my clients was forced to format and rebuild their entire infrastructure of 2 servers and 20 laptops from the ground up. They were down for 2 full days, and it took weeks to get back to normal. Don’t get caught, get prepared!

Upgrading your wireless network…It’s not as painful as joining a gym, and will save you from holiday headaches!

As with other electronics, your network gear has computer chips that need to be replaced every 5 years or so.  But, what usually happens is your network equipment gets put into a dark corner, only to be located again when something goes wrong. 

Small businesses often make the mistake of purchasing wireless network devices the same places a home user would – at Best Buy or Amazon.  Selecting the cheapest solution, i.e. Cisco, Netgear, or TP Link, but not necessarily the right solution, with the quality you expect and need, in a work environment.  

I recommend upgrading to a Ubiquiti unified solution.  Not only is their gear substantially higher quality, but they record and chart the status and history of all the network equipment in your office. With your Ubiquiti equipment connected to their web-based console, you can analyze traffic patterns throughout the day to identify bottlenecks and outages. 

Your business networks need to be able to handle higher traffic, particularly during your busiest times, which is when they are most likely to go down.  In order to help prevent any downtime for your business, I would love to talk to you about how we can upgrade and install your new Ubiquiti wireless network.

Technology is ever-changing, 
and so is your business.

Which is why its important on a yearly basis to take a longer view of the technology decisions that could help shape the future of your business. 

Annual meetings should be held with your IT professional to plan for technology updates, equipment purchases or system upgrades that may benefit your company. While it may not seem like a traditional time of year for budgetary planning, it’s never to soon to start reviewing your technology needs.  And, Summer is a slower time of year in the IT world, so it gives us time to make well-thought-out decisions on products!  For instance, I can help you plan your phase out of Windows 7 well in advance of it’s end-of-life in April 2020.

I’m heading out of town tomorrow for a short vacation (returning on June 8th), but I will reach out to my clients after I return to schedule your reviews.  

This newsletter is meant for informational purposes, but as always, I’m here to support you.  Please call me if you would like to discuss the best options for you and your business.  

Andy

This past fall, Joe Smith and Julia Anderson interviewed me for their Smart Money TV program at Tualatin Valley Cable Access TV.  Joe and Julia were well informed and presented me with a lot of insightful questions about areas of security including ransomware, backups, passwords and online banking.  It was so much fun.  I have never been interviewed before, but I felt very well-prepared and they were so attentive that I warmed up quite quickly.

If you are interested in a general overview of where you should begin thinking about your network security, I recommend watching my short (18 minute) video interview with Joe and Julia at TVCTV.

You know, if your computer gets stolen or destroyed, the drive you connect to it to run backups is likely to get stolen or destroyed at the same time.  Once you have a good local backup, it’s time to consider backing up at least some of your data to the cloud as well.

There are many good cloud-backup systems, but my favorite over the years has been Carbonite.  It is easy to setup and use. It has been very reliable for my clients who use it.  So this past year, I signed up as a partner with Carbonite.  As a Carbonite partner, I can better help you get the plan you need and if you register through me, I will automatically get access to your account through a dashboard app so that I can monitor your backups.  I will now be able to know immediately whether there are any problems with your cloud-backup and work quickly to repair the issue before you lose any data.

Here is the link to get you started with Carbonite through my account: http://partners.carbonite.com/proactivist

I recently remade the web site in WordPress

I wrestled for a long time with updating my website.  I liked the new look, but I worried that it would appear too simplistic.  My previous website was professionally done – a LONG time ago – but I decided to redo the website myself. Designed using Word Press, I chose the Lingonberry theme and added a few select, high-quality images. Even knowing the decisions were sound, I still had the hesitation that goes with doing something outside my core areas.  Now it is up, and I hope you like it.

I have been entering small blog posts on my development version of the site – all of the posts prior to this one – in hopes that this blog would be useful to you from the beginning, so please check out some of the rest of the blog articles.

The main issue this website revamp addresses is that the new theme is mobile friendly.  For the past year, we have been hearing that mobile-friendly websites would get way better results at Google, and then we heard that non-mobile friendly sites wouldn’t show up at all.  Either way, my site is ready.  If you want to test yours, head to this checker and enter your company’s web address.

If you are curious about how this site used to look, check it out on the way-back machine.

Hope your holidays were good. Let me know if you are interested in updating your own website.  I have plenty of tips, now.

There is a lot to be said about protecting your computer from encrypting malware.  I will have more to say soon, but for now I direct you to Blaze’s Security Blog where this post covers the basics.

I use and recommend all the protection software mentioned there: WOT, No Script, ScriptSafe, Ad Block Plus, and anti-virus are all necessary on any device or computer of any make.

In addition, I recommend a cloud-based backup system, such as Carbonite.  Note that Dropbox and other cloud-based sync tools are not effective in this role.