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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Although there are different ways to add, and sometimes you might just upload a spreadsheet of new contacts, if you just have one or two to add, you can do it simply, direct from your desktop. Log into your Constant Contact account. From the home page, click the Import your contact list link on the right side, or alternatively, click the Contacts link from the top to add new contacts.

Next, you will be asked how you would like to add contacts to your list. Click on the link right at the bottom for import tools:

You will see a list of many different ways to import in contacts directly (you may find some of these useful also). Click on the one right at the bottom, the Contact Capture Tool.

This will start a download. Pretty simple, just walk through the steps to complete the download. Once complete, you will need to enter in your user name and password for Constant Contact. You also determine which of your mailing lists you wish to sign people up to by clicking on Add or Remove Contact Lists from the middle of the pop up. Enter in the new contact e-mail address. At the bottom, you can determine up to 4 fields of information that you wish to contact. First Name is always a good one, as is Company Name. With fields, you can add these to your e-mails for a personal touch. Enter everything in and click Add.

If the contact is already in Constant Contact, it will let you know and ask how you want to handle this contact. If its a new contact, it will be saved exactly as you enter it. Click OK.

Once the contact is saved, you will be notified at the top of the screen. You can close out of the capture tool, but can either get back to it from your icons on the bottom toolbar of your computer, or from your desktop if you created a shortcut icon during the install. Quick and easy!

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The first one is a business that already had a great sit. Sarah Johnson, the owner of Pampered Pet Care of Atlanta, realized the value of having a blog on her site. Having a blog gives you access to publish articles, educate people and  inform clients of upcoming holiday news  or services. She also knew that a blog is one of the key elements in having great search engine results.

I was able to use her current site as the template, and incorporate the blog right into it, using the same images, fonts and color scheme. She has some great things to say, so check out her blog here: http://www.pamperedpetcare.com/blog

Next is another pet sitting company, but this time they are in North Carolina. Pet Sitters of Charlotte are a relatively new company. Phil & Lisa Koch were great to work with. Phil knew that to have a site that would work “for” them, Twitter, Facebook and a blog were the way to go. I created a website using WordPress, giving them control of their own pages using the Content Management System that this blogging platform provides.

I added all of the standard features to their package including a favicon for their site, submitting their site to all of the major search engines, adding keywords, descriptions and titles, and providing them with Google Analytics to see who is visiting their site. Their site is still so new, a couple of extra visits won’t hurt, check them out! http://petsittersofcharlotte.com

The last site I want to highlight is one I worked on for a wonderful lady named Tracy Knight. Tracy and I must have had about 3 or 4 calls before I started doing work for her. She already had a blog, but was using WordPress.com which has certain limitations.  Having reached the limit of what she could do with this, she began to realize that having a WordPress blog set up under her own domain would allow her to have a custom theme, put banner ads on the site, and get access to code if she needed to.

Tracy had a beautiful header image that I used as a starting point for her custom theme. Tracy’s blog provides inspiration, thought provoking questions and most of her blog posts get some great comments posted to theme. No matter your belief, religion or opinions, I think everyone can gain by taking a look at her blog. Keep up the great work Tracy! http://womenencouraged.com

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Well, to help keep me up to date, I use a service called Social Oomph. I signed up for it almost a year ago when I first got into using Twitter but have really found it useful the past six months during which I have tweeted more and more on the social networking site. Social Oomph allows you to sign up and create an account and link it to your Twitter feeds. It will track when you are mentioned, when you get Direct Messages, or when your tweets are reposted by someone else (retweeted).

Simply sign up for a free account, then click on Social Accounts, Add New Account, then Add Twitter.

Once you do this, you will be prompted to authenticate with Twitter which allows SocialOomph to connect with your account. Once you have done this, the following screen will appear. You have options to autofollow people that follow up, and send them a message directly at the same time. Be careful how you use this. Many people using Twitter hate this, including me. It’s impersonal and even worse, if it’s someone trying to sell to you it’s really offputting. You may notice that in the screenshot below, I do have a message and I am auto following people. Well, true, and here is where I view it as the exception. This account listed is one for our local city project, New Lawrenceville. The message is to inform people about an upcoming event we are having. Hopefully it won’t appear as salesy or offensive! Make up your own mind about setting that message.

Finally, you can then see all of the times you are mentioned and who mentioned you. One of the settings for your account allows you to have an e-mail sent to you at the end of the day, listing all the times you were mentioned. I like this feature as it allows me to see who has retweeted my tweets or sent me a direct message, even if I have been busy with other things throughout the day and not noticed this.

Finally, they do have a paid version with some fantastic features that I wouldn’t mind trying, but after the free trial, at $30, not sure I would be willing to fork out that much each month.

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When you get to the site, it will prompt you to sign in with Twitter. Once signed in and authenticated, it will take you back to the website. From here, the first screen has you select the canvas you want for your background. Going with the plain white one will allow you to pick a different color if you wish. The next screen gives you all kinds of options to add text, shapes and images. You can also pick the colors for your sidebar, links and text. Play around, drag things around and move them where you want to see them. It shows your Twitter profile in the middle so you get an immediate idea of how this will look.

When you are done, simply click on Generate Image. The image can then be saved, or exported directly to Twitter. It’s easier just to export it directly to Twitter. Once you click the button, that’s it! It’s all taken care of for you. How easy is that!

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You have four main sections on the info tab. The websites section can hold more than just one url. Put one on each line and add links for Twitter, LinkedIn, Kudzu and anywhere else  you would like people to visit. Use the Company Overview, Mission and Products section to add more information and let people know about who you are as a company.

Not sure how to do this? Log into your account and go to your page. Click on the Edit Page link that shows up underneath your page image. From the next page, click on Edit from the Wall settings. From here you can determine default landing page. You can also determine the default view for the wall and which posts will show (only your Page posts, Just Fans, or both Fans and Page posts).

Feel free to share a link to your Facebook Page below. How do you have your Facebook Page set up to encourage peiople to become a fan?

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Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in.  You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.

The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.

Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.

From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

What does it tell you?

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

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If I go out to Google and type in “Megan Walker” (my own name), here is what comes up:

Forget about the search results for websites, there is also a section near the bottom that will highlight profiles. So, if the person I met doesn’t remember my company name, but remembered my own name, he can easily get to me that way. Below is how my profile will look to someone searching online. Notice on the right I have many different links set up. All of them will lead back to Purple Star Consulting, in various different ways.

If you don’t already have a profile, you can simply click here: www.google.com/profiles Setting up a profile is easy. You can choose how much information to share, upload a photograph, add links and more. Try to keep things consistent. If you use a photograph of yourself for your Twitter or Facebook account, use the same one here for easy recognition. Add links to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, your website and your blog page in particular.

Have fun, and get to it! Feel free to share your new profile link below. Mine is www.google.com/profiles/purplestarconsulting

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Gravatars are linked to an e-mail address. This should be the same e-mail address that you will use to post with on others blogs.

You will receive a confirmation e-mail to click on. Once you have done this, you will be able to walk through and select the photograph or image you would like to use.

Once you image is uploaded, you will then be prompted to set a rating for your Gravatar. Once done, that’s it! Next time you add a note to a blog that has the Gravatar’s activated, your image will show up next to your name and comments!

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