“Efficient use of technology is essential to running a successful business. By leveraging technology correctly entrepreneurs will be in a position to scale and grow in a more efficient manner – and in many cases, with limited upfront investment required,” says Padraig Healy, executive director global for Dell Limerick.

Infrastructure investment may be the single largest investment a small business can make. Beyond the initial purchase cost, maintenance and updates throughout the life of the equipment and software will need to be planned into the budget. That’s a big pain in the wallet.

As business grows, infrastructure expansion to accommodate demand for content storage and computing power will take up even more resources. Along with this comes the need to hire someone to watch over your expensive equipment. Luckily cloud computing is on your horizon.

According to Gartner, an information technology research firm, by 2016 cloud storage is expected to increase to 36% of all storage, up from less than 8% in 2011. Adoption of cloud storage will be spurred by the increasing use of mobile technology and the idea of working anywhere anytime. Accessing the cloud is much less cumbersome than arranging for access to your own infrastructure. As an entrepreneur you are sure to appreciate the need to keep moving and computing as you build your business.

The cloud can replace your infrastructure with a virtual network that is every bit as secure as an on-premise platform. This virtual network is not only maintained and updated by the cloud services company rather than you, it is inherently more flexible. It can scale up and down to your needs and offer reporting, storage, and services to a geographically disperse workforce.

The biggest advantage to cloud computing is that you don’t need to invest in a vast array of infrastructure just to get your IT needs covered. More business applications are offered in the cloud each and every day with future updates and maintenance as part of the package. This leaves you free to invest your resources in other parts of your start-up.

King Arthur isn’t the only one with a quest. For marketers, the ability to target ads to very specific demographics is a holy grail pursuit. And there’s good reason for this desire. Any marketer worth his or her salt knows there are only a limited number of people interested in their product. Add to that the fact that all marketing budgets are finite and you’ve got a pretty strong case for targeted advertising.

As a startup, you’re probably still trying to determine your product/market fit. For you, targeted marketing is the most effective way to explore a potential customer niche. In this post, we’ll look at 3 ways to go about doing that type of focused advertising. But before launching into that discussion, here’s a caveat. Targeting IS good. But it’s not everything.

Remember that there are buyers you haven’t identified, those who don’t fit into your “perfect” niche, but who might actually be a great fit. Isaac Waisberg warns that with over-targeting, the customer, “…ends up getting the same information again and again. He is exposed to a narrow world, the world relevant only to him, as it were.”

So be careful about relying solely on hyper-targeted ads. After all, who wants Google being the sole arbiter identifying that perfect customer?

The Facebook Stalker

Once upon a time, you could only target Facebook users who a) were fans of your page or b) fit some general demographic info such as age, location and interests. In other words, they kinda asked for it by how they personalized their account.

But now Facebook has just given you a new and very powerful way of tracking down every person who has expressed interest in you. In September, the social media giant made the Custom Audience feature available to anyone with a power editor account or with an Ad API partner. This takes social network ad tailoring to a whole new level.

All that target customer info you’ve gathered, such as phone number, e-mail address or user ID, can now be matched up with Facebook’s records. That means that someone who signed up for your e-mail newsletter could now start receiving messages from you via Facebook ads.

As Shama Kabani points out at UpStart, the use of Custom Audiences will allow you to fit your messaging to very specific segments of your customer database: “…you can refine the target audience…based on how they’ve interacted with your brand. For example, you can run one campaign for those who have bought in the past 12 months and another for those who haven’t bought in a while.”

The jury’s still out on the effectiveness of Custom Audiences, but at the moment, it’s poised to be a game changer for social advertising.

The Search Engine Stalker

Targeted search engine ads are useful, but are too often overkill. The poor user visited your site a few times and is now followed by related ads everywhere they go. After a while, they’ll begin to ignore them for good. But this doesn’t mean search engines aren’t still extremely useful for targeting. There’s just another way of going about it.

Website personalization looks at what search terms a visitor used to get to your site, as well as where they’ve been previously. Based off of that, your site can present a more tailored landing page. For example, if I’m looking for red jogging shoes, and end up at your clothing retail site, you can present me a landing page with funky athletic clothes and scarlet-tinged accessories. With one swoop you both target and expand my interests.

This technology is still in nascent stage. But it’s coming. There are several start-ups in this field to watch, including Gravity, and Personyze. If this type of homepage personalization can be harnessed, it promises to increase sales significantly.

However, sometimes visitors can be a bit creeped out by it. Dave Copeland at ReadWriteWeb noted, “…customers are unnerved when a website knows something about them that they had not consciously shared.” There’s nothing wrong with segmenting your traffic, just be aware of how personalized you should get if the unsuspecting customer doesn’t realize all that you know about him.

The Information Portal Stalker

This method is a bit old-fashioned. You don’t use an algorithm to analyze customers or to segment visitors. It requires a bit more time and legwork up front. But it’s a decently effective means of generating first-time, highly engaged traffic.

In short, it’s sharing information on any and every site your niche market group hangs out. It’s finding the blogs they read and getting a write up or sharing a guest post. It’s using the hashtags on Twitter that they follow. It’s visiting forums, Quora and LinkedIn Groups and answering questions. Basically it’s giving out content value that establishes you as an expert to follow and trust.

One of the benefits of this method is that the people that read a blog post about you or by you, then click through to your site are obviously interested. They WANT to know more.  They are often an easier sell once they arrive because they’ve already received some education about your product/company before visiting.

Analyze the links coming in from these sources to find out which topics generate the most traffic conversions. You’ll also find out pretty quickly which sources are the best to focus on. It’s worth it to try and engage personally with this crowd whenever possible.

That’s my roundup of three methods of “stalking” your customer market. Got any to add? Share them in the comments section below.

Ever heard that wise piece of parental figure caution, “Money doesn’t grow on trees”? For startups, that’s doubly true. Tighter bank lending practices, cautious angel investors and crazy credit card interest rates are all squeezing entrepreneurs’ budgets worse than a “Seen on TV” gastric band.

But while dollar bills aren’t freely sprouting from traditional funding sources right now, 2013 could be the year that non-traditional startup funding becomes a forest. When the US Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Funding Act, the world of crowdfunding suddenly started scaling from simply financing hobbies, documentaries and apps to actually financing businesses…or at least it’s going to soon.

Early next year, regulations will be released that will define the ins and outs of what rules will govern companies issuing equity or debt security to their crowdfunding investors. At that point, startups will be able to raise up to $1 million a year. Till then, the funding cap is smaller and investors have to be rewarded with swag, product or experience, but no equity.

As many startups can already tell you, that lack of business ownership isn’t stopping the investors. Crowdfunding is rocketing many a niche business into reality.

Making Dreams Happen

Aussie based business Annex Products was able to raise $60,000 to produce iPhone accessories. In an interview with StartUp Smart, founder Rob Ward talked about how the ability to raise funds without giving away any ownership stake was a huge plus for him. He remarked that, “We saw crowdfunding as a great way to validate our idea, raise capital without relinquishing any equity and promote our products at an early stage.”

For Righteous Salad Dressing, an equity offering turned out to be the perfect choice. This UK-based company was able to raise $121,000 to offer their vegan and chemical-free dressings in supermarkets around the country. And as Gem, the company’s CEO explained, she views the investors as an extension of their marketing department. All those who bought stock in the company are now brand evangelists, spreading the message and helping the growing company increase its international footprint.

Pulling the crowd on board promises more benefits that simply gaining extra capital. As you run a campaign, you’re also validating your idea, figuring out whether it’s really any good or not. You’re testing your marketing prowess and your ability to appeal to the niche customer. Even an unsuccessful campaign isn’t a failure if you walk away with a bigger database of contacts and a deeper market knowledge than you had going into the process.

Marketing Into Existence

For all the hype of easy funding, there’s one simple truth attached to every successful crowdfunding project: it ain’t simple. Just putting up your profile and extolling the virtues of your as yet non-existent product or business isn’t going to make the money appear. The money genie only works when you pull out the marketing lamp.

Effective, time-tested marketing techniques are your new best friend. A crowdfunding campaign is all about pre-selling your product/event/business/whatever. It’s all about presenting the vision so clearly and with such passion that others are induced to come on board. Tell your story, make ‘em feel the need for what you have to offer, and convince them that you’re the one to make it happen.

Crowdfunding also works a bit like a lemming suicide jump. The more people that are investing in you, the more that then want to follow the herd and be a part of the project. The standard advice is to first aggressively tap into your personal network to get the ball rolling. Then as strangers see the number of investors rising, they in turn give you a closer look and hopefully jump on board as well.

Finally, you’ve got to use media. It’s been demonstrated time and time again that campaigns with pictures, videos, slides, etc. usually outperform those without (all other elements being equal, of course!). Scott Steinberg at Rolling Stones suggests, “A picture is worth a thousand words; use video and screens to communicate wherever possible, and focus on one to three unique sales points which should be reinforced in all descriptions and promotions.”

It’s Going to Take a Lot

Once the equity option kicks into, uh, Kickstarter, then startups are going to have a new world of funding options available…and a potential boatload of new rules to follow. There’s going to be red tape to work through, filings to make and due diligence warnings to issue. In fact, it’s up to you to let the investor know that there is a possibility, as much as you really don’t want to acknowledge it, that you might fail. And they might lose their investment. And they’d better be okay with that before clicking the “invest” button.

But in spite of the hurdles, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for startups that VCs don’t even notice. And for all those non-accredited investors out there, the ability to help a company launch could turn the world of startup financing on its head…and bring a whole new world of entrepreneurial dreams to life.

For more information, check out some of the crowdfunding companies:

• Kickstarter
• Fundable
• IndieGoGo

Would you use crowdfunding to finance your startup? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

On June 30th of this year, a nasty storm caused an ill-placed lightning strike to wreak havoc on a data center. For those millions of American engaged in their regular weekend routines of photo sharing, website pinning and action film viewing, things were a bit disrupted. In fact, they were shut off for several hours. That bolt of errant electricity did its deed. Amazon’s AWS was knocked out and pulled customers Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram, along with others, offline for longer than anyone expected.

And Amazon hasn’t been the only Internet giant to get knocked around by cloud problems. Google Talk also suffered a serious outage in July, and underscored a fact that is gradually becoming more and more apparent to businesses – geographically centralized cloud services isn’t a good idea.

Don’t Put All Your Data in One Basket

As Google Fellow Urs Hölzle has previouslysurmised, “At scale, everything breaks.” While this is a well-known truth, the recent AWS failure was a rather hard yank on the chain for many IT managers, many of whom were relying a bit too heavily on the cloud. And as hyped as it has been in the past, increasingly, the cloud reliability kool-aid is starting to wear off.

Frankly, if a CTO has any concern about uptime, then they’re scrambling. At the heart of the matter is the need to avoid depending on any single data center (or in Amazon lingo, “Availability Zone”). If a disaster occurring in one location takes down the whole cloud service, then a business had better be thinking hard about a different deployment strategy.

Business intelligence advisor Jorn Bettin doesn’t have much sympathy for the companies affected by the AWS outage. He argues that Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest should have been creating what he terms “geographically redundant links.” QuotedinaZDNetarticle, he states, “”They could operate at a higher level of redundancy, so that these sort of outages would only have a minimal impact on them.”

The moral of the story? Ryan Shriver says it well in hispost on the Virtualization Practice: “The simplest and most cost effective way is to deploy your applications across multiple, geographically disperse regions…a little extra cost and complexity is certainly preferable to an outage.”

Why Gridblaze Has Gone Global

Because of these concerns, we at Gridblaze have put some safety mechanisms in place to minimize the risk of localized failures. For one, we’re using an independent data center in another country. All data stored with us is mirrored at this second facility. If one storage center isn’t working, you’ll still have access through the mirror site.

Second, we’re not relying on just one service provider. For that matter, we don’t even think two is enough. In order to get maximum resilience for our clients’ data storage and access, we’ve employed 5 isolated and independent providers.

The choice to use multiple providers isn’t necessarily the cheapest or the easiest, but it does have one very important thing going for it: it’s the safest. While there’s been a whole lot of talk about risk management and the cloud, most of the discussion has been focused on security and compliance issues. If nothing else, the AWS failure is bringing outage issues back into the conversation.

Reliable service doesn’t happen by accident though. Greg Arnette, who was also affected by Amazon’s outage, chastises his fellow cloud denizens, saying, “…what’s been missing is expert supervision and serious conversations about risk management…If you’re serious about your application’s SLA to your customers, you need to invest time and money.”

We Do Our Part, You Do Your Part

Minimizing cloud service downtime is a team effort. As the storage company, we’re making every effort to be certain that your files and data are there when you need them. But the second part of the picture is the Application layer. This also needs to be designed with geographical redundancy in mind.

We recommend that you make use of multiple service providers for maximum reliability

Yeah, it’s going to be a bit of a headache, and you’re going to have to do some research to ensure data portability and reasonable data transfer costs. But in the end, that extra ounce of prevention is worth a pound of trying to “cure” a single vendor outage, alaGoogle.

Now for the sake of complete honesty, we’re going to be upfront. At the end of the day, there’s no guaranteed, 100% failsafe way to prevent outages. That’s just the hard reality of doing business in the cloud world. Bugs happen. It’s impossible to test or plan for every contingency, and Murphy’s Law applies just as much to the cloud as to any other environment.

But all that being said, what we can prepare for is every known potential issue. And that’s what we’ve done at Gridblaze. By using multiple vendors for your data and storage, even if one continent goes off the grid, you’ll still have access to everything you need.