Anita Campbell published “51 Tips for Saving Money on Technology” on her Small Business Trends blog last week. Four of the 51 came from me:
Eliminate Paper and Filing with Screen Shots
“I’m finding I can eliminate a lot of paper and filing expenses–not to mention filing and recovery of documents–by taking quick screen shots of web orders and travel documents and such. I save them on my CPU unless they’re travel documents, in which case I save them as JPGs and put them onto my iPhone.”Use the Amazon Cloud
“We’re saving several thousand dollars a month now by having moved our servers from a server farm somewhere else to the Amazon cloud. We get much better up-time and response time, but for significantly less money. We’re also using the Amazon cloud for storing files and backup.”Insist on Price Reviews from Existing Vendors
“When the recession was at its worst we pushed our vendors that provided phones and the office internet bandwidth to redo their pricing. We found that vendors we’d been with a long time were giving new customers much better deals than existing customers, and we insisted on a review.”Hold Meetings Online Instead of Traveling
“We’re using the web conference for webinars and to host meetings, often one-on-one meetings, to reduce our travel costs. We’ve had success with both WebEx and GoToMeeting. We’re finding the simple meeting online as quick and easy, and a lot more effective, than getting on the plane.”
I’ve included these here because they were mine, which makes them automatically my favorites. But they aren’t the best of the bunch. The entire post is good reading.
Save Money on Technology | Small Business Trends
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
