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!

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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:

• 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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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If you have Microsoft Office 2007, and have either Word or Publisher, you will know that you can save a document as a PDF, pretty quick and easy. PDF documents can be used when putting together a contract, creating project plans or any time you want a document that can be ready easily by someone else. For those of you not up to date with your Office products, there is another tool out there you can use. Primo Pdf is available for download to your computer at no charge. Once downloaded, Primo works like a printer would. With the document open that you wish to convert, simply click on the print button within Word or Publisher.

The screen to the left will open. Next to the path by Saved As, you will see a little button to the right. Click on this and you can select the desktop, or a folder to where your PDF can be saved. Click on Create PDF. If you have the Post Process set to “Open PDF” it will open up for you to review. Your PDF can now be used and e-mailed to others if needed.

There is also a service available that will do the exact opposite, convert a PDF to a Word document. This is provided by the same people that make Primo PDF, NitroPDF Software . With this, you go out to their website (visit site here), find the PDF document you wish to convert, select if you want it as a .doc file or Rich Text Format, then enter in an e-mail address that you want to have it e-mailed to. The e-mail takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get to you, but the conversion is pretty good! NitroPDF Software also have a convert PDF to Excel version that is also free.

Back in July, I did a post on Mozy, a service that allows you to back up your files for free. Learn more about Mozy.com and how you can use their services to have piece of mind, knowing that your private, confidential and critical documents (or maybe your precious family photos) are backed up each night, sitting waiting in the event that your system crashes and you need to recover them.

YouMail has been around since 2007 so still fairly new, but well worth checking out. Many small business owners work out of their home, or travel around so much that a cell phone is their mode of communication. Having your cell phone as your business phone is ok, but it means you lose a lot of functionality that a regular land line has. YouMail provides you a method to set up different voicemail messages that can be assigned to different callers.

Creating an account is free of charge. You set up your cell phone to work with this service. Once set up, YouMail is where you will get your voicemail (can easily be programmed with a speed dial number like you have now) but one of the great things about it, is that you can have several different voicemail messages set up. Consider this, those annoying blocked call numbers, a standard voicemail message can be set to inform the caller you don’t accept blocked or unrecognizable calls. Or, the pushy sales man that just won’t stop calling, add their number online and set their voicemail message to a “this number has been disconnected or is out of service at this time”. Perfect to get your number off their call list! You can also set it to get an e-mail or text each time you get a voicemail, and by paying a fee, can even get voicemails transcribed and sent to you in text format. You can also record your own messages and easily switch between them online, one for regular hours, one for weekends, one for the holidays and so on. Much easier than having to rerecord messages for each scenario as it arises.

Finally, another company that offers a variety of cool tools is Each of their services allows you to grade a marketing area of your business. You can grade your Facebook Business Page, your WebSite, a Press Releases and Twitter accounts. Grader.com is by a company called HubSpot. Below, you can see where I entered my Twitter account and got a grade of 89 out of 100. They take into consideration a number of factors, quality of posts, number of followers, of those you are following, and the number of updates made.

Website Grader allows you to put in your url, and also add other websites you want to compare yourself against. This is great if you want to see how you compare with your competitors. How are others in the same business as you stack up against you.

Hopefully all of these tools will be ones you can actually use and will add value to your day. Let me know if you find anything, or know of any other tools that we could all benefit from.

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The download is simply. Go out to their site, simply click the download button and run the install that is displayed. You will need to have Outlook closed to do this. If you forget, you are prompted to close it anyway so no worries there. Once you are logged back into Outlook, you will see a new section to the right of your Outlook client. Xobni will begin indexing all of your e-mails, sorting them, grouping them and providing some fun statistics. Who do you e-mail the most, who e-mails you the most, who responds the fastest to you and so on.

Here is where the cool stuff begins. I get an e-mail from a happy client saying thank you for some recent work I have done.

The e-mail is from Valerie Pegg at Best Fit Pet Sit. As a client, obviously we have communicated before. One of the first things I can see are the number of e-mails that we have sent one another. She ranks #4 out of all of the people I have communicated with. Looks like I am a bit of a stalker having sent her 223 and only received 25! I send a lot of group e-mails so I can see that I e-mail her a great deal. I can also see that I tend to e-mail her most later in the evening and vice versa.

I can also see her contact information at the top of the Xobni plug-in. She is on Twitter so I can also see her Twitter feed if I want to. If I wasn’t already following her, I could simply start following her from there. I can also tweet my own status right from there also, still staying within Outlook and not having to go out to the Twitter website.

Further on down I can see Valerie’s network. The network includes people that we have both communicated with on an e-mail. Rodney Camren is one of the people in her network. This means that Rodney is a shared connection or contact between the two of us, we have both been included on e-mails that are sent to him.

Conversations allows me to view a string of e-mails between Valerie and myself. I can see everything I have sent to her and received from her. This allows me to quickly sift back through the communication we have had with one another. There is a search function at the top that I can also use to type in key words. If I remember Valerie telling me about an event she is going to be at, I can use keywords to type in and see all e-mails including those as a match.

Files exchanged shows any attachments that I have either sent to her, or have received from her. Again, if I remember her sending me something but forgot to save it, I can easily get back to it from here. Appointments can also be searched through, but only with the Xobni Plus version which you have to pay for. At $29.95, pretty darn cheap!

Along with Twitter feeds, I can also review her profile on Facebook, Linked In and see if her company has a profile on Hoovers. Xobni has also made it easy to send the recipient your availability by automatically formatting an e-mail including information based on your outlook calendar. Simply clicking a button will create a new e-mail for you to send out to a contact or new client.

Finally, you can review daily, weekly, monthly and yearly stats with Xobni Analytics. This allows you to review your e-mailing habits, see if you are making the most of your time, and the times you are most likely to get the most amount of work done.

I swear I don’t work for Xobni, and no promotional kick back to be seen, I just think this is an amazing tool! The more you can do to save yourself time, the better. Plus, this is FREE! You can’t get better than that. Try it, if you don’t like it, or don’t “get it” just remove it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This is the way forward for e-mail management, time saving, faster searching, and it’s pretty fun too!

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How is your computer looking? What about your files? Regardless of the line of work you are in, you undoubtedly have client files, financial documents and important spreadsheets stored on your laptop or PC. If you are diligent, you might back up your files once a week, even once a day if you are really proactive! It might be a process of taking specific files and adding them to a thumb drive or backing them on to a CD. This is all good practise but think of this. Where do you then store these back ups?

Forgetting about technical glitches, the crashing of your machine and the dreaded blue screen of death, what about the awful unthinkable event of a fire, or a breakin. No amount of Insurance can bring back the priceless photographs stored on your laptop if you are a photographer by trade. A graphic designer would be lost without all of the graphic files they have been working on. How many of you store service agreements, menus, directions, price lists or house listing information on your precious machine?

There are numerous services out there for creating and storing backups online. One I just recently began using is Mozy. They have various options, and most importantly for a small business focusing hard on your bottom line, one option is free. You are granted up to 2GB to start with. For some, this will be more than enough. If you want to back up music files, video files or other large documents, you could quickly run out. However, unlimited space is as cheap as $0.50/GB of space. Even with the free account, you can earn extra GB as you refer other users. Not a bad deal! Hint, if you want to check it out, why not use me as your referrer! You can use this link: Mozy.com or use code WA9HP6 or meganwalker@purplestarconsulting.com during signup.

So, even without going with Mozy, and picking one of the other guys out there, backing up, and doing it online is certainly something to consider!

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* You can utilize Google, MSN and Yahoo and upload info about your site to their search engines. This helps people find you faster. These are all free and also gives you ways to search statistics and tell you the keywords people are searching on and finding your site through.

* Although it can be work, this one is also a free way to get people to your site. You can go out to sites that have blogs (like mine) and pick those that are relevant to your business. Every so often, go and post a comment. I look for sites that a small business owner might visit. When you post your comments, you have the opportunity to put your name, e-mail address and a link to your own page. If you are posting worthy, interesting and informative comments, people will then go back to visit your page. Free and you can also learn things yourself!

* Find other sites to link back to yours. This is a little easier for me because when I create a site for someone, I can put a link to my page at the bottom to say who the site was designed by. However, I have also built up relationships with other companies who have been gracious enough to put a link from their site to mine. This can create traffic back to you.

* Offer freebies, giveaways and contests. People love to think they are getting something for nothing! It doesn’t have to cost you a whole lot, but it will help get your company name out there.

* Finally, (for now!) use every free social networking site you can think of to start building new business relationships. I have two Facebook profiles. One is my personal page, family and friends that I communicate with. The other is for building new business relationships. Gaining their trust and getting to know people. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups, anything you can use that will cost you time but not money.

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However, rules for friends and family do not apply in business. It is astounding how many e-mails I receive from relative strangers who have a long list of recipients and don’t care to hide us from one another. Although the bcc field does serve the purpose of keeping a 3rd party informed of information you are sending someone else, this isn’t it’s only purpose. Bcc should also be used to protect your recipients information from one another. In business this is important on many levels. The trust you have built up with clients, or working on building with potential clients can be ruined with one little e-mail. You could very well be working with businesses that are competitors or could be looking for new contacts themselves. Don’t provide them with your database in one swoop!

I recently had a call from a credit card processing company. I am in the market for a new company to work with and the person calling caught me at a good time. So, I asked her to send me more information for review so I could follow up once some research had been done. The e-mail I received not only had two other recipients listed, but also had each of our names laid out in the body! The attachment of information was also addressed to a completely different person altogether. If you take that little care over my personal e-mail address, not sure how you would fair with taking care of my credit card transactions, so I declined to do business with them.

First impression is everything, and you are making it with e-mails every day. Think before sending out anything addressed to more than one person. Consider not only your relationship with them, but their relationship with one another. If in doubt, bcc and make the greeting generic. If something should truly be personalized, then just send individual e-mails. It might just save you a client or too!

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