By Marty Orgel

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — In these tough economic times, owners of businesses small and large are coming up with unexpected ways to save money.

The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay said it will save $10,000 annually by changing its font type. The university switched from Arial to Century Gothic because Century Gothic font doesn’t use as much ink when printed, according to an Associated Press report.

In these days of economizing, changing your font style is an innovative way to cut costs. Here are six other ways to save money without drastically changing your business practices.

1. Move paper forms online

Another educational institution said it, too, is saving $10,000 annually — by switching from paper forms to online e-forms.

“We use tens of thousands of forms in all sorts of applications,” said Al Foytek, director of business information systems for the Visalia Unified School District in California.

“The money we save using electronic forms like those from software maker PerfectForms can easily cover the cost to automate our whole processing procedure,” Foytek said. “For example, our print shop uses a paper form which costs us about 75 cents each and we have around 15,000 requests that require other, specific forms each year.”

2. Take it to City Hall

Negotiating with City Hall is another key way to save, said Amy Handlin, deputy minority leader of the New Jersey General Assembly and associate professor of marketing at Monmouth University in New Jersey. The state legislator also wrote the new book, “Be Your Own Lobbyist.”

Handlin said lobbying local and state government is the most cost-effective way to fix a small-business problem.

For example, she said, a city inspector told the owner of a bakery in Salt Lake City that the business would be shut down unless the owner spent $40,000 to install a grease trap in the street. With skillful lobbying, the bakery owner was permitted to place a grease trap in her own kitchen at minimal cost, with the understanding that it would be accessible for monitoring by the city.

Then there’s the group of small-business owners who went before the Massachusetts Public Health Department, Handlin said. New frozen-food regulations required businesses to buy refrigerated trucks that cost $50,000. At a public hearing, the business owners argued for cheaper alternatives. The state agreed, allowing the affected companies to transport goods any way they wanted as long as they maintained safe temperatures.

“Lobbying the right people with the right message is precisely the way to speed things up,” Handlin said.

3. Speed up the payment cycle

Another way to save money: decrease your payment terms. While 30-day-net and 60-day-net are the normal time periods small-business owners give clients to pay invoices, changing those terms can save money, said John Reddish, president of Philadelphia, Penn.-based Advent Management International Ltd.

“Shorter turnaround times can result in lower borrowing costs for money for operating capital,” Reddish said. “A faster turnaround on payments cuts the interest small-business owners have to pay.”

Reddish said one stamping company client changed the due date for billing to “net 15″ and cash flow improved by 31%. For many small businesses, he said, 30-days-net translates into payment up to 63 days later by the time the client actually cuts a check. Making payments due net 15 translates into payment in 48 days — a 31% improvement in cash flow.

There is a downside to this practice, Reddish said. If a customer challenges the change in terms, “you either back off or risk losing business.” But if the client is happy with the services or goods the business owner is providing, changes in terms often slide right through.

4. Sell global, ship local

Shipping costs often are a major expense for both online and brick-and-mortar small- business owners. The cost of fulfillment can make or break a small company. That’s a problem that Shipwire Inc of Palo Alto, Calif., is leveraging. The company offers worldwide shipping at local-country rates, saving customers thousands of dollars in international shipments.

Shipwire has six warehouses in three countries where it stores inventory for small businesses, and works with 15 carriers and freight systems. Pay-as-you-go pricing plans start at $30 a month. And small-business owners can scale-up as business grows.

“Many companies save $30,000 a year with our services,” said Nate Gilmore, Shipwire’s vice president of marketing.

The savings come when businesses can charge customers local shipping rates instead of international rates. For instance, Gilmore said, a San Francisco-based software company can use a Shipwire warehouse in London to deliver an order in Manchester and pay only local U.K. shipping rates.

5. Perfect the art of the deal

With the U.S. Air Force spending billions of dollars a year on outsourcing, researchers at the University of Tennessee felt there probably was room for significant savings.

“The Air Force spends $34 billion on outsourced services a year, and is always trying to find better ways to save taxpayers’ money,” said Kate Vitasek with the Center for Executive Education at the University of Tennessee.

Vitasek said that using “vested outsourcing,” an idea developed by the university, the Air Force saved $79 million on an engine maintenance program for the F/A 18 Hornet.

What is vested outsourcing? It’s the process of negotiating contracts with vendors so that they earn more when they meet all the terms of the contract, and they are penalized when they don’t. A vested outsourcing agreement will cut hidden contract costs and only pay the vendor if and when that vendor successfully lives up to the terms of the contract.

Vitasek said Microsoft Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!msft/quotes/nls/msft (MSFT 23.20, +0.04, +0.17%) used vested outsourcing principles with the technology consultancy firm Accenture PLC /quotes/comstock/13*!acn/quotes/nls/acn (ACN 38.21, -0.07, -0.20%) . The 7-year contract is valued at $185 million and “they have cut the costs 35%,” or almost $65 million, she said.

The University of Tennessee studied only very large companies, but Vitasek said all companies, from mom-and-pop markets to multi-billion dollar institutions, can benefit from vested outsourcing.

6. Pull in some free advertising

Bert Martinez of Bert Martinez Communications LLC in Houston, Texas, has a unique take on guerilla marketing. He said small-business owners can reap large rewards by scouring local yellow pages and business directories.

“Call the phone numbers in your competitors’ ads,” he said. “You will always find several ads that have disconnected numbers. Then surf competitors’ websites and find any that are out of business.”

Then, contact the telephone company and the website domain name registrar. When possible, buy your competitors’ website names and take over their telephone numbers. The phone company and domain registrars can assign those disconnected numbers to your main number, and the websites can be redirected to your site.

“Voila,” Martinez said. “You’re now receiving tons of new yellow-page advertising and web traffic!”

Marty Orgel is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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As the most potent chemical component in coffee or tea, we are all very aware of caffeine. Next time you’re sitting around the coffee shop, enjoying a latte and perhaps talking about coffee in general, you can appear quite learned by tossing around these caffeine facts.

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Over the past year we’ve known that Google now uses speech to text conversion. That means that they take the SPOKEN text from videos, and convert it to text.

While they won’t tell us WHY they do that, the obvious answer is that they are looking for RELEVANT CONTENT. They now use your spoken text to categorize and rank your video.

So we’ve been experimenting a bit, and we’ve discovered that in most cases you can improve your Google ranking with your websites by adding keywords in your spoken audio.

Note – Google actually publishes information about their ranking algorithm on their website. You can read it for yourself at http://www.google.com/technology/.

TIP: Remember to place your main keywords up front, and use them throughout the video. Use them in a organic or natural way, but write your script just as if you were writing a web page that you want Google to index, because with their speech to text conversion, they are applying the same algorithms as if it were just written text.

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How to negotiate your medical bills

See original article from WalletPop

“About 60% of doctors will give a discount,” Martinez says. Sometimes he’s able to negotiate a fee upfront working directly with the doctor or the manager of a large practice. Other times, Martinez, who specializes in sales and marketing training, barters for his family’s health care needs by offering to streamline the doctor’s business or improve the marketing section of their website in exchange for medical care. He’s even posted ads on Craigslist offering his service in exchange for specific medical care needs, such as physical therapy

But negotiating upfront is Martinez’s preferred method of cutting medical costs. The key to success, he says, is to ask for the decision maker, know what type of financial help you need and how much you can afford to pay upfront or in monthly installments — then ask for less than you can afford.

Suppose you can afford to pay $100 per month until the bill is paid off — you should offer to pay $80 per month so you have some financial wiggle room. Always remember, says Martinez, “it’s not personal, it’s business,” and conduct yourself as though you’re negotiating a business deal..

Even if he’s checking a family member into the hospital, Martinez will ask for the person in charge, such as the finance manager or revenue manager, and strike a deal as part of the check-in procedure. He’ll work out a discount, as well as a payment plan before his family member is admitted. course, not every medical practice or hospital is willing to negotiate. In that case, Martinez will seek medical care elsewhere.

Mark Rukavina, executive director of The Access Project, a nonprofit that educates people on how to negotiate medical bills and insurance claims, says the most important thing to do is communicate with the medical provider. “Don’t ignore bills, hoping they’ll be resolved at some point in the future, whether you are insured or uninsured,” says Rukavina. Instead, ask for a discount. Insurance companies get discounts of 30% to 40% or more, and you can fight for the same discount. But, like Martinez, Rukavina cautions that you shouldn’t agree to terms you can’t afford. If you don’t pay according to terms, all your time spent negotiating could be for nothing.

If you are uninsured, you’re likely being billed at a much higher rate than any insurance company. “You have a lot of wiggle room” when negotiating, Rukavina explains. You can call the Access Project for help, but its model is one of self-advocacy. They’ll help you find the information you need in order to advocate for yourself.

If you’re not comfortable negotiating or have a hard time sorting through complex medical bills on your own, you can turn to paid medical advocates, which typically charge a percentage of what they save you. Medical Cost Advocates charges 35% of the amount saved. Health Advocate charges 25% to negotiate bills. It also works on an hourly basis (charging $120 per hour) to help people with specific needs, such as finding a specialist or disease management assistance. The company will contract directly with major employers that pay $1 to $5 per employee for guidance on navigating the health insurance maze. Health Advocate’s “Healthcare Survival Guide” offers some tips on cutting medical costs that you can download for free.

There are also medical bill experts who will negotiate your bills for you. After seeing a client’s medical bills and determining how much time it will take to negotiate the bill lower, Judy Medeiros-Mitchell, who’s based in New York City, sets a flat fee upfront. She has negotiated bills as high as $50,000 for $500.

Medeiros-Mitchell also advises people on how to negotiate medical bills themselves for free if she thinks it’s a relatively simple bill to deal with and they want to try. She explains that most of the battle is in knowing how to find the right person to speak with. And if you offer to pay cash upfront, the practice won’t need to do any paperwork, which can work to your advantage. Another key to negotiating successfully is to know what the provider will get paid after the insurance company takes its discount.

To figure out that information, visit Healthcare Blue Book, a website developed for the uninsured and underinsured that provides the data they need to negotiate prices. At the end of May, a new website developed by Alex Fair called FairCareMD is expected to launch that will help you find a doctor willing to negotiate in your area.

Lita Epstein has written more than 25 books including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Security and Medicare and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Medicare Part D.

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