3 Steps to Using Web Conferencing for Your Home Based Business

Communicating with freelance or telecommuting employees: Unless you're a jack of all trades, there's a good chance you'll have others working for you; maybe not necessarily fulltime employees, but probably at least a freelancer or two. If your company has a website, you'll probably need to at least communicate with your webmaster. Company websites often require the skills of more than one person, so you may also need to communicate with graphic designers, programmers, database administrators and any number of other people.

Using web conferencing software, you're webmaster can instantly share their screen and show you the design in progress. Your graphic designer can show you your logo design and you can discuss and see changes on the fly. You can discuss changes and additional features while you're both looking at the same item on the screen. Instead of both of you navigating the design separately and trying to stay on the same page, with the screen sharing feature found in web conferencing software, youll know you're both looking at the same thing.

Using screen sharing in web conferencing isn't just helpful when working with your webmaster and designer, it's helpful in just about other type of communication with remote workers. Maybe you've hired someone to write your blog posts and you want to preview them and make suggestions before they're published. Instead of passing a text document back in forth in cyberspace, jump on a quick web conference and discuss the article in realtime; making changes as you go. Then you can publish the blog post with confidence, knowing it's up to your standards.

Discuss finances with your accountant: Communicating with your accountant can be stressful enough, especially when it comes to tax time. You may need to spend hours on the phone discussing expenses, write offs and receipts. You could easily cut this time in half by discussing things visually and not just verbally using web conferencing. Imagine this scenario, you're accountant calls you to discuss a couple of the receipts you dropped off at his office the other day. Unless you've kept a copy of all the receipts, or have a photographic memory, you may have difficulty recalling what every receipt and expense was for. What are your options in this situation?

1. Take time out of your already busy schedule, drive to the accountant's office, spend valuable time looking at and discussing everything and then drive back home; wasting even more valuable time.
2. If there are only a couple of documents or receipts in question, you could ask your accountant to scan in those documents, or if you're using video conferencing, they could even hold the document up to the camera. I know this may sound primitive, but your time is important. Then launch an instant online meeting and discuss those receipts and expenses. If you need to discuss any digital documents, your accountant could quickly open that document and with the screen sharing feature found in most web conferencing software, you could discuss the document.

You're time is very valuable and for the most part, it's the only business resource you can't get more of, so why would you waste your time driving somewhere to do something you could easily do online.

Provide interactive tech support to customers: If you're a home based business selling a software or hardware product that requires tech support, there's a very good chance you, or a spouse may be the one doing the tech support. If that's the case, you're probably looking for a way to quickly solve your customers issue and move on to the next task. If that's the case, then using web conferencing software to give your customers realtime, interactive support is something you really should be considering.

Let's face it, you're customers are the lifeblood of your business and offering quality tech support for your products is essential to having happy customers and creating repeat customers. With that being said, if you're not in the tech support business, then you probably don't want to spend all day on the phone providing tech support.

What's the easiest way to cut the time you spend on the phone with each customer for tech support issues? Interactive support. Instead of describing to your customer possible solutions to their problem and hoping they have the computer skills to do it, why not do it for them. Connect with your customer using web conferencing software and then ask them to give you control of their screen. Once they've done this, you can't simply go through the steps to resolve the problem for your customer. Not only will this save you time, but your customer will be happy with how quickly you resolved their issue.

These are just a few of the countless ways that web conferencing can benefit the home business owner. If you're not quite convinced, or worried about making a commitment to a web conferencing solution only to find out it doesn't server your needs, there's no need to worry. Most web conferencing providers offer a free trial from 15 to 30 days, so you get a chance to test drive the software before making your decision.

Once you have your first online meeting using web conferencing, you'll wonder how you every got along without it and you'll be thinking about all the ways you can use it to save you time and money.