University of La Verne SBDC Small Biz Blog

  Artificial intelligence, or AI, has gotten a lot of press lately with Chat GPT and now Google’s Bard, automating tasks, writing, and just making certain tasks so much more bearable. As a small business, there are ways to harness the power of AI to take care of things you probably think you need an extra employee to do. I’ll show various ways you can use free AI tools like Chat GPT to handle these tasks so you can focus on running your business. Getting Started Head to chat.openai.com and create an account to get access to the chatbot. Here are a couple of things you need to understand about ChatGPT before we begin: It only knows things up to 2021. So if ask it about a current event or phenomenon, it probably won't know what you are talking about. It may produce inaccurate information like statistics, facts, or places. So take all the “factual” information at face value. With vague instructions (called prompts), you may not get the best answer. So, we need to be as descriptive as

By Joshua Botello If you’re looking to create graphics for your emails for marketing materials but have no idea how to do that, then using the tool Canva may be something you want to look into. Canva is a free online graphic design tool that can help any small business owner be a graphic designer with free templates for Marketing and social media. So let’s get into the review. Who’s it For? Canva is primarily for small business owners who don’t have a large marketing budget to spend on graphic design. It is also for the non-artistic or creative business owner who needs to create email or other social media content. You can easily grab a pre-sized template for most social media platforms and quickly edit for a graphic or make your own custom ebook, worksheet, or presentation. Canva is not for those who are engaged in creative marketing and do you have a budget for a graphic designer to create their graphics for them. Demo So getting started with Canva is as easy as setting up a free a

By Joshua Botello 2020 was all about virtual meetings and Zoom was the one to use. It was easy and free. But is it a good choice for your small business? In this video, I will cover what you need to know to get started with Zoom and its features to see if it’s right for your business. So let’s get started. Who is Zoom For? Zoom is primarily for small and medium business owners who are looking to set up virtual meetings and want easy-to-use software. Zoom is also an easy way to give webinars and stream online to Facebook, YouTube, and other third-party platforms. Zoom is not great for tech-savvy business owners or full-time content creators who want more quality in their streams or live webinars.  Demo Let's take a look at how to get started and what we can do with Zoom. Just head to Zoom.us and sign up for a free account with your email address and a password. Once you can set up your account you can download the zoom client on your Windows or Mac and log into your account. From y