Archive for the ‘Office Tips’ Category

The other day I was looking online for something and stumbled across a great little website called MyLiveSignature. You can use the site to create an image file of your name or signature. Why might you want to do this? Well, if you want to show your name at the end of your blog posts (see mine if you are looking at the main page of this blog post) or in your e-mail signature, you can use regular text, BUT, it will only look the same way if the viewer or recipient has the same font installed on their machine.

You can create animated signatures if your heart desires it, but I just used it to create an image of my name. It is so simple to use, I am not going to walk through each step, but here is the basic premise. First you enter in the name you want to use. Then, the next screen shows you how your name will look in over 100 different fonts. Click through to view and then select the font that you want.

Next pick the size of the font. Then the color. If you want to use the image on a website or anywhere with a colored background, set the background to be transparent. For my purpose, I went with purple text. You can also set the gradient of the text so it looks more like a signature.

Finally, your signature will be displayed to you. You can right click on the image and save it to your computer.

You can then use this image file in your e-mail signature or add it to your blog posts! Quick, simple and easy to use. Have fun!

GoToMeeting is a tool I have used for a number of years now and is something I couldn’t do without. Sometimes it’s a training session I am giving that has multiple attendees who need to call in from different locations, or sometimes it is a client who needs a little help with their WordPress Blog, either way, GoToMeeting is what I use in these scenarios.

Granted, this product will only be useful for certain business owners but one should never assume, so wanted to share it with you! Here is how it works, straight from the horses mouth so to speak:

Pretty simple right? Some of the features are as follows:

• Show attendees your desktop, or switch to an individual person’s desktop. Great when you are trying to help them solve issues with their machine or a specific program they are using
• You can also share a keyboard and mouse. This allows you to move around their machine, or vice versa.
• You can use their phone service which allows you to have up to 15 people conferenced in on the call at one time.
• Online sessions can be recorded. Great for training sessions that can be used in the future for others to view.

So, as you can see, a lot of great benefits to using GoToMeeting. It’s perfect for the small business owner, just $49 a month for the service. If you want to get bigger and have the need, you can use their GoToWebinar product which allows you to have a maximum of 1,000 attendees at one time!

To get started with GoToMeeting click this link to get a Free Trial + $10 Off or click the ad below. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

When I started out with Purple Star Consulting, I knew I wanted (or needed really) to have a fax number. I looked at some fax machines, all pretty expensive and not within the budget of a new company getting started. Also, I didn’t want to be tied down to having a physical fax machine that I have to use to send and receive faxes. As a consultant working on my laptop, I love that I can do my job from any coffee shop, beach or vacation home in the world! So, I wanted to keep my faxes the same way.

I did some searching online and found e-Fax. I found out that I could get a fax number that sends and receives faxes using my current email address. Click here to check out their site (they have a 30 day FREE trial too!). I need to be able to receive signed service agreements and this service is great. Using a fax number assigned to me, the sender can use their own fax machine and send the sheets of paper through in the usual way. When receiving the fax, it comes through as a PDF attachment to my e-mail address.

The cost for the service is a monthly fee. You get a certain number of free sends and receives, then after that you pay per page. Below is their current costs for their eFax Plus service.

No more buying expensive toner, no more faxes that are difficult to read due to black smudges all over the paper, and no more missing important faxes because you aren’t right by your fax machine! You don’t really have much to lose with trying out the FREE 30 Day trial. If you don’t like it after that, just cancel. Pretty simple!

I don’t normally gripe and moan, and usually I just try to give the facts. BUT, this post is based on the overwhelming increase of being bombarded with e-mails lately! Unfortunately, it’s e-mails that are unsolicited, from people I don’t even know. Or, people who I sent an e-mail to once, and they have decided I should receive an e-mail from them every week about their specials. Not cool!

So, this post is to explain why this is wrong, and what you can do instead.

To market your business in an effective way, best practise is to ask permission to e-mail  someone. Plain and simple. Asking is easy! Now if you meet someone at a networking event, they give you their business card, they are effectively giving you permission to contact them. Contacting them is one thing, but if you want to sign them up for your newsletter, give them the option to opt out. Don’t take it personally if they do, they might just not be interested at the moment, or like me and so many others, they might have subscribed to a million other newsletters!

Don’t just use Outlook or your e-mail client to e-mail. There are limitations set by many companies that if you e-mail to many people at one time it’s considered spam, therefore potentially not making it to all (or any) of your intended recipients. If you MUST e-mail this way, be sure to read one of my older posts The Power of BCC! It’s there for a reason, so use it. Another reason not to use your e-mail client (Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail) is that it just doesn’t look that good! There are only so many things you can do, and mostly you are looking at plain boring raw text e-mails. Not really exciting and enticing for people to read through.

Consider using a service like Constant Contact or Aweber. I did another post to find out if Constant Contact is worth it. I have never used Aweber but have heard great things about it so be sure to check out both before you decide. You can use templates to create professional HTML e-mails to get your messages across. A big plus with Constant Contact is that people can opt out, and also confirm that they still want to be signed up for your e-mails. They can also forward them on to other people to prompt their friends or contacts to sign up.

Sending people e-mails and NOT giving the option to opt out is rude. It shouldn’t be up to the recipient to just keep deleting them if they don’t want to, and many people don’t want  to appear rude by responding with a request to be removed. Think about your own e-mail techniques and tactics. Are you guilty? It’s ok, we have all committed e-mail sins at one time or another.

Fancy a gripe? What frustrates you? We all get so many e-mails every day, sifting through those unwanted ones is a pain! Share your stories below!

Back in May I wrote a post called “how do they find you?” which referenced Google Analytics and tracking the statistics of traffic and visitors to your site. This is something I set up for any new client I work with, and include as part of a basic Search Engine Optimization package that Purple Star Consulting offers. Using it just to view how many people have looked at your site is one thing, but this free service truly offers comprehensive ad hock reporting, it’s a shame not to be using it or understand all that it’s showing you.

When you first log in, you will be shown some basic statistics. The green check mark is important, this means that Google is still able to track that you have the necessary code in your website pages. If you see anything BUT the green check mark, let your web designer know. This means that your visitors are not currently being checked. In the screen shot above, it is showing how many visitors came to my site within a week. It also compares this with the previous week and shows if that count is up or down percentage wise in comparison. Looking at this, I am down 21.43% from the prior week. However, if I look at a month range, I can see that in October I am up 54.94% from Septembers visitors.

To get to the Dashboard area, simply click on the View report link. This will take you to an overview of Site Usage,  Visitors, Content, Map Overla, Traffic Sources and Goals. This gives you a brief view of each area. From there you can drill down to get more detailed numbers. The first thing to notice is the date. by default, the last date it shows will always be yesterday. Perhaps it is Thursday night and you had sent out a newsletter that morning. Want to see how many visitors you had? You will need to change the end date to today. Here is how.

Go up to the dates, and click on the small downward pointing arrow. The following drop down calendars will appear. With the first date in the range selected, click on the date you want from the calendars. Next, select the end date range you want (this is where you can select today’s date).  You can also check Compare to Past which will allow you to compare to a previous time frame. Think of comparing different days or weeks when you sent out newsletters, or a time when you had a sale or promotion going on. Great to compare how things are improving (or not).

Once I have the date range I am interested in, I can then go down to see my visitors. It’s great to see how many people have come out to my site each week. However, what is even more interesting is to see how many are new visitors, or unique visitors. This means that more people are finding my site (I can find out how by looking at the Traffic Sources section to see Keywords and Links used to find me). When I drill down to the Unique Visitors, I can see how many came each day: What I can also do, is use the Map Overlay section to see where the visitors are coming from. With this, I have to drill down to the country first (United States in my case), then drill down to the State (Georgia is where I market) and then see the cities. This gives me an idea if the right people are finding me, meaning, can they use my services rather than a visitor from Botswana finding me. You can change the view to a pie chart for a simple visualization from the views on the right of the page above your statistics.

So, I can see how many unique visitors I have had, and I can also see where all of my visitors are from, but how about seeing them both together? That is where the Custom Reporting comes in handy. Click on Custom Reporting from the navigation on the right hand side of the screen. Next, click on Manage Custom Reports, then from the top right of the next screen, click on Create New Custom Report. The reports are created by dragging and dropping fields that you want to track on a report. They are separated out into Dimensions and Metrics. See below for the items I used to create a report for Unique Visitors By City (the name of the report is changed by clicking edit next to the current name). I want to see the number of Unique Visitors, with the number of Page Views, then drill down to the City Level. I save the report then go to view it.

Once you are looking at the report, drill down till you get the cities in view. From here, you can use the Export button at the top. This will then give you a variety of ways in which you can export the report for review, PDF, XML, CSV or CSV for Excel. Click here for a PDF version of the report that I exported.  Next, click on the link for Email. You can e-mail the report to yourself, or anyone else just one time, or set a schedule to send the statistics to your self on a weekly, daily or monthly basis. Finally, click on Add to Dashboard. This will add the report to the initial Dashboard page of Google Analytics. It will be added to the bottom of the Dashboard, but you can simply click and drag it further up the page if you wish.

Then, next time you log in, you will automatically see these statistics. There are so many possibilities for custom reports. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not too difficult. Please let us know if you have any questions, wonder if it’s possible to create a specific report, or want to learn more.