Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar has a post on Ten Ways to Effectively Reduce Your Small Business Energy & Technology Costs at the American Express OPEN Forum.

Here are four of the ten simple steps to take to help you deal with these costs.

Use a VoIP solution for your telephone needs. For my own small business, all of my phone service is handled by Skype. I have a phone number, receive calls on a normal phone, and I can easily set up conference calls and videoconferencing with just a few clicks. My cost? $2.99 a month after about $30 worth of startup costs and setup that was roughly as complicated as plugging something into a USB port.

Use a virtual PBX service to manage your phone calls. A managed virtual PBX service like My1Voice gives you a virtual receptionist to manage calls for your business under one number. Calls are rerouted to your personal phone (or, if you wish to have extensions, are routed to the phones of your employees) or to any phone you wish to have calls routed to at a given time. They’re surprisingly inexpensive and much more effective than installing equipment.

Use your computer as a fax machine. Don’t shell out a bunch of extra money for a fax machine and an extra phone line. If you have a printer and a scanner, you already have all you need. Use a service like PamFax to manage your faxes and get rid of that extra phone line.

Buy recycled printer cartridges. Printer ink can be incredibly expensive. I’ve used many, many recycled cartridges over the years and never had a problem – but I have enjoyed the 60% savings on cartridges. Re-Inks is a good place to start.

Read the rest at the OPEN Forum.

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