Tools Archives - TechBasedMarketing

How This Online Tool Turned Me Into A Kick Butt Graphic Designer

By Lynette · Comments (29)

Saturday, November 9th, 2013

Those who know me know I love pretty web things. Gorgeous themes, beautiful banners, eye-catching infographics. If you have those, I’m hooked. Sadly… I can’t design good graphics to save my life. This doesn’t stop me. You may have seen the tutorial how to create Pinterest graphics using Pixlr. I can make something passable but it takes a long time to come up with the concept. That part, I’m horrible at and am always looking for ways to make it simpler, faster, better. Last week, I came across a brand new tool called Canva. If you view the home page itself, you will get a glimpse at how awesome this tool is. Their design is fresh and totally unexpected. What I love about this tool, it lets me create awesome social graphics really quickly. Graphics like this: and this: You can also make Facebook timeline headers Presentations – I made this one for a private event I’ll be attending this weekend You can also make some really nice infographics, although I’ve not done that yet. What I Love Best Besides these, perhaps the best thing is – easy access to premium images. Among my biggest frustrations is having to search,

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Easily Clip and Save Offline Content With These Apps

By Lynette · Comments (0)

Thursday, October 17th, 2013

One of my yearly goals is to read more non-fiction books. Though I’m a voracious reader, this is not easy because I grew up on a staple of fiction. Unlike in the United States, the education system I grew up in didn’t really encourage reading. The result, I never read non-fiction until my late teens. It’s a wonder I even have a reading habit. Back to present day. The more non-fiction I read, the more content ideas I seem to get. Some of my reading material still come from offline publications. Very often, these aren’t mine to keep. They take the form of library books, magazines in waiting areas or loaners from friends. And many times, I find myself wishing I could ‘clip’ these for later reference, or to help create content for my sites. Initially, Evernote was it but even with text recognition, it’s not that easy. I can’t copy and paste these snippets to quote the author for example. Good thing I stumbled upon some awesome apps that are going to be heavily used from now on. Text Fairy for Android ABBYY TextGrabber + Translator for iPhone, iPad and Android eHighlighter for iPhone I’ve only used the first

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Safely Share Logins With Your VA

By Lynette · Comments (0)

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

When so much we have is done online and our helpers are also scattered all over the world, sharing your logins is a necessity. This has always been a troublesome issue but thankfully, LastPass makes it super easy and safe. Here’s how. Download and Signup for LastPass If you aren’t already using it, go to LastPass.com to download a browser add-on or plugin. Once you download and install that, you will be prompted to create a new account. An account is free and you can store as many passwords as you want for free it’ll even sync across different browsers and different computers. The biggest limitation for free accounts is share and mobile syncing. If you want to take your passwords with you on your mobile device you have to go premium but at $12 a year it’s not a huge sacrifice. Store Your Logins Once you have the browser add-on or extension installed, simply log onto any website you want to store as you would normally. Save Logins After you log in, you will be asked to Save the site if you wish. Click Save Site. Saving Site A popup will then appear that looks like this. Very quickly

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7 Mac & Windows Apps I Count On To Amp Up The Workflow

By Lynette

Friday, April 26th, 2013

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

Turn Documentation Creation Into A Fun And Fast Process

By Lynette

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

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

4 Ways To Creatively Use Your iPad For Video Creation

By Lynette

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

When my friend, the fabulous Lexi Rodrigo was writing a blog post recently, about unusual ways she’s using her iPad for video creation, she asked if I was game to be tagged. In my head, iPad + apps + video = mega geekery! Hello? No way could I ever pass that up. Before getting into my top secret techniques, check out Lexi’s post how she uses the iPad in video creation. Good stuff! Admittedly, the iPad doesn’t (yet) play a very big part for me when it comes to video creation or webinars. That doesn’t mean I don’t try A Whiteboard One of the very first apps I bought was Air Sketch. This is an app we covered on the blog before as a replacement for PowerPoint. It allows me to pull up the iPad screen onto my desktop browser. I can draw on the blank canvas, open an image or PDF. Everything I draw on the screen shows up in my browser. This is great for annotating, sketching or even wire framing with the team during a webinar and during live classes or calls. If you work in an office setting, this is also a wonderful tool because once you

Blog Post Ideas – There’s An App For That

By Lynette

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

This is just how crazy things have been for us around here for the last month. We’ve been working hard on plugins, pushing them out, scheduling more to be developed in the pipeline AND we’ve also been creating… an app! If you’ve been around for a while you may know we have a fantastic free blogging resource over at BlogEnergizer. We send you blog post ideas, tips to motivate, encourage and move ahead regularly. Every year, around the end of the year, you will also receive a fresh yearly blogging planner and calendar in PDF format. Go sign up now. Well thanks to our content savvy friend Alice Seba who suggested once we create an app for it. We finally dug in and did it. Introducing… the BlogEnergizer App for iPhone and iPad. It is a very simple app (for now). When you get stuck what to blog about, check out today’s idea for a fresh topic every day. If that still doesn’t do it for you, tap Events to see what people are celebrating today. Almost every day, week or month, there is a type of celebration or awareness event that you can use to jump start your blogging. Have an

Plugins To Easily Find & Insert Stunning Photos For Your Blog

By Lynette

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

Have you ever written a post quickly but spent more time finding and posting the photos? Yeah. That kinda sucks but photos do make your posts more interesting and in many cases, amplify its meaning. While the Grab & Save plugin has been mentioned before as one plugin I absolutely adore because it shaves so much time off the photo insertion process. There’s still room for improvement. For one, I’ve often wished the photo finding, import and insertion process can be done in one go from WordPress without having to copy URLs nor open multiple browsers. Were there other options? As always, WordPress – with its diverse, active and smart group of users and developers – doesn’t disappoint. Here are a few of them. Microstock Photo I really liked how this one functions. When you save your post and enter some tags, the plugin automatically searched iStockPhoto or Fotolia for relevant images. You can also do a manual search. If you configured the plugin to connect to these two stock photo sites, you can also purchase the photo and have it downloaded from your post page itself. Even better, you can configure it to invite people to purchase the image

Two Terrific Graphic Tools For Web Content Publishers

By Lynette

Saturday, November 24th, 2012

It really is no wonder Pinterest is wildly popular because no matter how you think of yourself, humans are, by and large visual creatures. This post is not about Pinterest though you could definitely use these tools to help you create Pinterest graphics. What I’d like to share today are two first-rate image tools I’ve been using for a while. First up – PhotoScape. This is a neat little software that is actually a collection of 13 tools in one. Here’s a list of the 13 features: Editor Batch editor Page (for creating collages) Combine Animated GIF Print Splitter Screen Capture Color Picker RAW image converter Rename Paper Print Viewer The features I use the most are Editor, Page, Viewer and in lesser degrees combine, batch editor. While the editor feature is far from PhotoShop or even GIMP, it lets me very quickly spruce up an image with text that looks great. Check out this post about WordPress widgets to see an example how I used PhotoScape to make an image from Morguefile look nicer and tie in better with the content. It’s also an added bonus the software is fairly lightweight for an image editor which means I don’t have

Easily Sign Contracts With Your iPad

By Lynette

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Software have always been my Kryptonite. Now, with smartphones and tablets, that ‘addiction’ has transferred to apps. During one of my quests, I found a neat app, Carbon Pro. The core of this app – it lets you create contracts and sign them. There are lots of different features like emailing them after signing and creating templates. Bottom line, easier to lug around your phone or the iPad than a bunch of printed forms. It’s also a lot more organized and productive as well. I can imagine visiting a client, agreeing on the services, whipping out the iPad and having them sign and the contracted emailed out to them instantly. That way, you can get to work as soon as you return. Here’s the official list of Carbon Pro’s features: Import and sign any PDF document. Print and sign documents via Wi-Fi. Signature stamp option (with passcode). Duplicate any/ all templates. Add multiple pages to each template. Change company logo at the top of all templates. Import and export .CSV files (i.e. Quickbooks). Send documents with or without borders. Screen lock for more accurate signatures. Import information from contact lists. Template “Favorites” section. Template “Settings” options. Help Center (instructions). Landscape mode. Search

How This Online Tool Turned Me Into A Kick Butt Graphic Designer

Easily Clip and Save Offline Content With These Apps

Safely Share Logins With Your VA

7 Mac & Windows Apps I Count On To Amp Up The Workflow

Turn Documentation Creation Into A Fun And Fast Process

4 Ways To Creatively Use Your iPad For Video Creation

Blog Post Ideas – There’s An App For That

Plugins To Easily Find & Insert Stunning Photos For Your Blog

Two Terrific Graphic Tools For Web Content Publishers

Easily Sign Contracts With Your iPad

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