Why You Should Never Use A Free Email Address For Your Business
The message is clear: email is king. Many clients and customers choose to communicate primarily by email and as you know, it gives a fantastic ROI in your marketing strategy…unless you’re using a free email like Hotmail, Gmail, or even your internet provider. If that’s the case, you’re losing business each and every day.

It looks unprofessional: Imagine if banks used free email accounts – you’d never feel comfortable giving them your personal details let alone any money. How people perceive your business is what makes your business. Without that professional touch, you’ll appear temporary and fly-by-night. It puts your credibility into question and sends the message that you’re not serious about doing business – or worse – that you’re prepared to cut corners.

It erases your experience: Newer, fledgling businesses often start out with a free email address. The address clearly communicates that they are new and have little experience, and are perhaps testing the waters in a new direction. They’re not even remotely proven yet and are firmly within the hobby-zone.  Continuing to use the free address once your business moves into the professional arena means you’ll struggle to build momentum and any experience will be negated.

It’s forgettable or inappropriate: Your business success hinges on being memorable enough to gain referral custom and results from your advertising. Unfortunately, free email addresses are by default filled with hard to remember clutter, for example – joesplumbing_1985@hotmail.com or milkshakes_mybabby@gmail.com.
Neither of these roll off the tongue, is appropriate for business, or can be remembered without a high likelihood of typos and bounce back. Branded email addresses such as joe@joesplumbing.com make running a profitable, scalable business much easier.

It’s not permanent or safe: When you use a free email address you are at the mercy of the email provider. They may close down operations or cancel your account for any reason. These types of accounts are also often hacked and leaked on a global scale. When a better internet or email deal comes along, you’re still stuck using the old address because it’s printed on your business cards, car lettering and flyers.
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Some will agree to keep the address open for a fee, but you’ll lose the control and flexibility you need to grow your business. With your own domain name, you own it and can move it to a new business-grade email service easily. You’ll also have complete master control over the addresses within your domain, resetting passwords and creating/closing accounts at will.

​When you’ve upgraded to a new computer, the old one is a bit of an albatross. You paid good money for that desktop or laptop, and you want to continue to see return on investment. Plus, disposing of that technology feels wasteful. It’s not as if a computer is going to compost itself! To help, we’ve provided seven solid ideas for how to repurpose your old, extra computers.

#1 Turn it into a Kids’ PC
Make the computer available exclusively to your young ones. You can set the device up with parental controls software to:

• limit the sites they can access;
• control when and for how long they can use the computer;
• restrict them from downloading without your approval;
• monitor their activity.

You can also isolate the device from the family’s home network to further restrict their access and cut the risk of malware infection.

#2 Make a PC for Seniors
Or, accommodate those at the other end of the seven stages of man. Turn the computer into one geared for older family members. Optimize screen display color contrast for those with poor vision. Make the text size bigger. Set up the use of voice commands. You might even use puffy paint on the keyboard to make common keys easier to find.

#3 Convert to Storage
Storing documents, videos, photos, and music on your computer takes up a lot of room. So, turn that extra computer into a media storage device to keep your new computer in top shape. Think of it as an external storage device with much more capacity than a thumb drive.
Backing up your documents and media to the cloud is always an option. Yet, you may have more that you want to store than you want to pay the fee for storing.

#4 Share a Printer on the Network
If you have a printer that connects via a USB cable, you can generally print from that computer only. You can turn your old computer into a print server that shares the printer over the network. This way, any computer on the same network can make use of the printer.

#5 Donate
If the computer is in decent condition, donate it to a school, library, charity or other non-profit. Of course, before doing so, you’ll want to clean it up:

• Back up and then delete all your files.
• Consider “zero filling” your hard drive so data cannot be recovered.
• Reinstall the operating system so it is usable by the recipient.

​#6 Sell Parts
You could continue to see value from that extra computer by parting it out. This is a good idea especially when the computer is no longer working and can’t be held onto as a backup (just in case). In some cases, parts sell for more than complete computers.

When you’re looking for that new computer or would like to recycle or donate your old one, our IT experts can help. Contact us today at 218-240-8802.