What if I told you using “cookie cutters” in your business is actually a good thing? I’m not saying you should copy everything. Especially when it comes to your brand, your platform, your message, the core of your business. That doesn’t work. What I am saying is, in the management of your business, templating should absolutely be implemented. More Doing Let’s say you want to host a webinar but don’t have a topic, feel overwhelmed and want to give up before you even start. If you have a sheet of topic ideas to choose from, wouldn’t that help jump start the process? Surely you’ll be able to come up with a topic before long and you can move to the next step. When you build a binder containing things like – overview checklist, webinar topic ideas/suggestions, list of people who can help, guest speaker solicitation email template, webinar format template, pre-webinar promotion template, post-webinar promotion template and more – you already have some place to work from. You know what you need to be doing next. The end result is more doing, less thinking. Thinking is good and there is a time to think creatively and strategically but when it
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For most of us, the forms provided by Aweber (or our email marketing solution) works just fine… most of the time. There are some projects where it would be smart to attempt to collect more information from the lead. One smart reason is like a form of opt-in upsell where you provide an option for people to get a freebie of a bigger value if they provided extra information about them or choose to continue, settling for the original freebie and less information. As your technical advisor, I’m happy to tell you this is very do-able, the bad part is, you will require some HTML and perhaps Javascript or PHP knowledge depending how complex your form is. Set up custom fields Your first step is to make sure your custom fields get set up in Aweber. If you haven’t used this feature before, it is where you add the groups of information you’d like to collect on your form. For example, if you need to collect the number of bedrooms people are looking for in a rental or their monthly rental budget. You’d create one field for budget and one for bedrooms. Create two basic forms Next, set up a
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Oh Pinterest. How it captivates us. I think it is the perfect exemplar how visual most humans are. As a blogger or website owner, you might want to take advantage of the traffic you could be getting from Pinterest. You can roll your eyes – as I did – but when I saw how Pinterest suddenly became a top referrer for one of my sites, you bet I sat up and paid attention. But there is a challenge. Getting those graphics created especially if you lack creativity (like me) and really wouldn’t like to fork out hundreds of dollars for PhotoShop. In the video below, I’ll guide you through the steps for creating pin-worthy graphic from scratch using Pixlr, a free online tool. This tutorial is about 18 minutes long and is packed with tips especially if you are new to graphic creation. After you watch the video, don’t forget to download my Pixlr Pinterest Graphic Templates below. FYI – you can certainly download GIMP which I also highly recommend. Like any professional grade image manipulation software though it’s a huge program. That’s why I love using Pixlr for Pinterest graphics. Since it is online, it means I can access
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Thanks to friends on Facebook who led me to this excellent 6 minute talk. It is very encouraging for me because I personally don’t think I posses any skill, knowledge or intelligence that is higher than anybody. In fact, growing up, I’ve thought of myself as untalented, nothing special, average and unlikely to achieve anything great. In many ways, a lot of that still remains. There is one silver lining though. I’ve always thought of myself as being stubborn and determined. After listening to Angela Lee Duckworth, I like ‘grit’ much better because it explains so much more.Well worth listening to. Particularly if you don’t feel you have what it takes or feeling a little beaten. I also loved this bit from her talk Also, there is a short ‘gritty’ quiz you can take to find out how ‘gritty’ you are. Check it out. I scored 4.25. What did you score?
Does it ever feel like each time you sit down at your computer, to get some serious work done, you can’t figure out where you saved a file that you need? When you find it – after too much time searching – your mind goes blank and you have to start psyching yourself up again. Ugh! So frustrating. My husband unfortunately, suffers from this very dilemma. Lest someone think I’m picking on him, It was him who asked for help so we’re good. In observing his computing style, I realized he’s the type who organizes (or tries to) from the desktop. Naturally, he’s looking at the desktop pretty regularly but doesn’t have a good system. After a little bit of brainstorming, I figured out the perfect tool. A desktop wallpaper. Yes, seriously. While there are many productivity geared wallpapers all over the Internet, I thought he needed something more specific. After spending a few minutes in Photoshop, the result is this wallpaper. We’re not quite done tweaking it, which is one reason why there is ample room to add other points of organization as we go. For now, it is a good start and a huge improvement over the previous
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People who have had the privilege (or bad luck) to watch me work on my computer often get frustrated because I tend to fly from one thing to another pretty quickly. It hasn’t always been like that It’s just that I’ve always asked myself how something can be done faster, easier or both. Over time, there are a couple of apps I’ve come to rely on daily and I’m happy to share them with you. Quick Window Snapping Even with two monitors, I still like to quickly snap windows side by side when working on code, blogging while researching, recording videos on Camtasia and even when balancing the checkbook. Having many apps quickly arranged in a grid is nice too. In Windows 7 and 8 you can already do this. It’s just not customize-able. When you want one window larger than the other, or 4 windows on a screen, you are out of luck. The solution is GridMove for Windows and Moom for Mac that I found not too long ago. That is huge. While I love my Mac, I am not impressed with its window management so Moom is a lifesaver. A Better File Manager Windows Explorer sufficed for many years
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When you first begin outsourcing, one of the most intimidating things to do is showing people to do what you want to do your way. To achieve that, there’s nothing better than documenting your process. Having documented a lot of things for helpers, students and even as blog content, I know full well creating textual documentation with screen shots has its challenges. It takes many, many steps, tediously switching between the browser, the screen capture tool and the word processor to get it done. I’ve often wanted to give up documenting a process because it’s just too painful until I came across ScreenSteps desktop. What made me want to download it was its ability to connect and publish to websites like WordPress. This is perfect because much of the documentation I write is put up on this blog or in a closed private area powered by WordPress. How ScreenSteps Work You can create lessons or manuals. Manuals are a collection of lessons. You start by creating a step in the lesson or by capturing the screenshot. Where it saves you a ton of time is this – captured screenshots are immediately added to the step. From there, you can add annotations all
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One of the best features about PayPal is the ability to create limited access sub-accounts. You can specify exactly what each person can see or access. If you outsource (and you should), this is perfect because you can let your customer service team to handle refunds, check validity of orders, or give your book keeper access to download reports. Setting up limited access sub-accounts is pretty easy and straightforward. Here are the steps you need to take. Log Into PayPal As Primary Go to PayPal.com and log in as the primary account holder. Go To Profile On the menu, locate the Profile link and click it. My Settings On the next page, you should see a menu to your left. One of the options is My settings. Click to go there. Manage Users Somewhere in the middle of this screen, you should see an option to Manage Users. Click the Update link for that option. Add User Click the Add User button. Security Confirmation You may be asked to confirm some account information before you can proceed Create Login Enter the user’s Name ID which will be used to log in Password User Permissions Select what you’d like the user
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If you do any kind of business online, you’re bound to have an account in several social networks and you often have a profile page where people can read your last shares. That’s all great, but admit it. It’s sometimes difficult to remember the URLs to these profiles. Beyond that, I often wonder at marketers – and I admit making this very same mistake – why we are so smart when it comes to creating affiliate redirects but not for social profiles? Sadly, nothing lasts forever. While I don’t foresee Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest closing down yet, nothing is set in stone. Great example – Google Reader closing which came as a surprise for many. Truth is, companies cut stuff out all the time. There may not be a rhyme or reason to you but they surely have very legitimate reasons they won’t tell you about. Why would they? Besides the ‘fear’, what about more practical reasons? Take Facebook Pages as an example. A new Page has to achieve a minimum number of fans before you can request for a unique URL. Most of us just beg our friends and network before we promote the Page. Nothing wrong with
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Among the most annoying things to be asked to do is… “Clear cookies from your web browser” When you do that, you’ll have to re-login to many sites you are in and out of daily or even several times a day. If your work is entirely online like mine. This is a huge pain but at times very necessary so you can gain access to the site you are having trouble viewing or when you need to test out a plugin. The great news is, clearing your cookies doesn’t have to be an all or nothing exercise. Especially if you use Firefox and Chrome. If you don’t then… you should Below are steps how remove a single cookie or all cookies relating to a particular web site domain. Removing Selected Cookies On Chrome 1 Click on the Customize and Control Google Chrome button, then on Settings 2 Make sure you are in the Settings section. Scroll all the way down and click on Show advanced settings. 3 Click Content settings under the Privacy section. 4 In the Cookies section, click the all cookies and site data button. 5 In the pop up, enter the domain name of the cookie you’d
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