Rewards, Rewards, and more Rewards

Looking for ways to maximize your credit card rewards? The American Express Platinum card will earn 4x bonus points if you buy things online through the bonus points mall. You can buy things like office supplies, gifts and hotel reservations. Every time you use the site to buy things you earn 4 points for each dollar instead of 1 point.

Also, you can transfer your points to many frequent flier/hotel programs. We use Southwest a lot because they give you more for your points, and if you book 10 flights in a year, you earn a free companion pass for 1 year. This means that you can choose one person to travel with you anywhere thjavascript:void(0)at Southwest goes for FREE for one year! I know 10 flights is a lot, but you can give the points as gifts or use them if you are sending your staff to a meeting. If you are going to spend the money, you might as well earn some rewards!!

Tips For Improving Your Dental Website

Check out this article about 5 things to do to improve your website. Some of these things are kind of basic, but it is important to do all of these things.

Phone Service

As most of you know your phone service represents a significant ongoing expense. The good news is there are a lot of new offerings in this market. Voice over IP and hosted Voice over IP options are becoming affordable and cost saving alternatives to the traditional "Big Bell" telephone service. Some of these options require new hardware such as telephones and phone systems. Others include the hardware as part of the service. If you have an existing phone system there are a lot of alternatives to the big telephone companies that offer excellent service and can save you hundreds of dollars every month. These offerings differ for every geographic location, but I would call your technology specialist or phone system vendor and review what is available in your market. The money you save can be quite significant.

Guru on Your Dental Website

If you use Henry Schein's Guru, you can implement the patient education videos into your website. Once you are signed up for Guru you can embed any video into your website. You can adjust the size and they implement nicely with your design. Take a look at one of our websites that just added Guru videos.

Internet Usage in the Dental Office

It is a natural reaction to the recent spread in malware and viruses around dental offices. What are people doing on the Internet and do they really need to be on those sites? We suggest the following solutions to this problem.

1. Remove the Internet from the computers you don't want people using to surf the net

The problem with this is that it will disable programs like Casey on those computers as well.

2. Install an Internet filter program like Net Nanny that you can use to block certain sites like Facebook and Myspace.

3. Install a keyboard tracking software like KGB Spy which tracks every keystroke for each computer on which it is installed.

The problem with this is you cannot see the specific user that is typing, meaning if several people use the same computer, the program will not discern between the users.

Malware Spyware Strikes Back

We have noticed in the past few weeks an increase in infected computers with malicious malware or spyware. Especially one called Personal Antivirus. It is important to use extreme caution when surfing the web. If your computer gets infected, it could cost hundreds of dollars to remove the malware and you could lose important data. So, the best defense is to limit your web surfing on your work computer and to stay away from sites like myspace and facebook. Also, if you see any pop-ups that reference your antivirus protection, do not click on anything!! Just step away from the computer and call your computer tech. By clicking on things, you can actually start installing viruses on your computer and make things much worse. These bugs are very clever and will disguise pop ups to look like real messages, when in fact, they are viruses themselves. So, be careful out there. Also see our previous post about helpful software that can catch some malware before it goes too far...but before you do anything...call your computer tech.

Pandora Upgrade

Pandora is a great website where you can sign up for a free account and listen to music that is geared towards your preferences. All you do is enter an artists name or a song you like, and then Pandora plays similar music that it thinks you will like. You can set up many different stations and as you hear the songs give them a thumbs up if you want to hear more songs like that, or thumbs down, and it won't play that song again. It creates your own customized radio station. The only draw back is that you are limited to 40 hours of listening time per month.

Pandora now offers unlimited hours with a subscription of only $36/year and many other additional features.