BizTechDay 2009 was two-days filled with fascinating speakers geared towards educating small business owners and entrepreneurs on tools and technologies that can make our businesses run better. I came away from the event with a huge list of to-dos and tons of inspiration.

Here are some of the cool tools and lessons I learned that will be useful for all business owners:

Things to read

• The eMyth by Michael Gerber (required reading for all entrepreneurs – I can’t believe I waited 7 years to do so)
• Zero Defect Hiring by Dr. Pierre Mornel 
• “1000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly
• Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill
    

Tools to check out

Virtual Office / Project Management

• Base camp – project management
• High rise – CRM for small businses
• Skype – this is old school but good reminder for conference calls / video conferencing
• Kolbe Index - understand the strengths of your human capital

Marketing Tools

• Justin.tv - video will be critical for all marketing - justin.tv lets you do it live
• Compete.com- competitive digital intelligence
  Voice123.com - voice talent and voice producers for your audio and video marketing
• Google.com/lbc- local business center – brick and mortar businesses should update their listings on a regular basis
• ping.fm - update all your social networks at once

I came out of the event not only with lots of plans for this site and for Off The Ground, but also as a Twitter addict. While I’ve been an avid Facebooker (join my new Facebook Fan Page for a long time, I now see the value of joining the conversation on Twitter, so if you want to keep up with more interesting learnings, give me a follow.  I mainly tweet about small business tools and trends, social networking and generally cool trends in marketing.

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