Archive for the ‘Office Tips’ Category
October 25th, 2009 | 
Author: Last blog post, I referenced Xobni, a great free tool to use within Outlook. In this blog post, I wanted to let you know about some other free tools that can be found online and used in running your business.
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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As small business owners, we all have something in common, a lack of free time! I recently came across a free Outlook “add-in” that can save you time in many areas. Social networking is the thing to be doing, building those relationships, communicating as much as we can. Xobni is a free plug-in that you download to your computer. It interfaces with Outlook to provide you a faster, streamline way to search through your e-mails, find people through different social networking venues, update your contact records accurately, find attachments and keep track of conversations.
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!
At the end of the night you turn out the lights, lock all the doors and go home. You finish for the day and have done all you can to make sure your business is secure. Or have you?
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!
Several people have recently asked me about SEO – Search Engine Optimization. They know they need to do it, but are not sure where to start. Cheap, or preferably free is the way to go if you are on a tight budget, and who isn’t! Here is some advice I recently sent to a friend back in England.
* 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.
Just like everyone else, I send and receive a ton of e-mails every day. Some are business related, others are personal through my own private mail box. Those ones typically are to friends and family and are often updates to let loved ones know how things are going and generally to catch up. As a family unit, my brothers, sister and parents might send an e-mail with all of us cc’d on the distribution list. We all know the other one received it, and this is fine.
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!
