You can set an option to ask your callers to state their name, so you can screen your calls.  Don’t want to pick up the phone?  Press 2 and send them to voicemail.  The voicemail is stored on a mp3 file which is delivered to any email address you specify.

In addition to this, you can use the same number to receive faxes at no additional charge.  The faxes are sent to any email address you specify.  Outgoing faxes?  You only spend pennies per fax.  To do this, just log in to their control panel, upload your document, punch in the fax number, and press send.  Your fax will go through in a couple of minutes, and you can check the status to see if it went through or not.  There’s even an option to attach a cover sheet in which VoiceNation will make for you.  You don’t need a clunky fax machine anymore.

There’s so many more features including detailed stats, and this is only for the $9.95/month plan.  To see more of what VoiceNation offers, click here.

I’ve been using VoiceNation for a few years, and I’ve been really satisfied with their service.  Don’t want to spend $9.95/month?  I’ve got something for you next week.

Last August, I just finished getting my haircut, and it was time for me to pay up.  I gave the hairstylist my card, and he swiped it on a credit card reader attached to his cellphone.  I was amazed by it, so I asked him about it.  He told it was a free Square Card Reader  Square makes their money from the transactions which are only 2.75% for each swipe.  That’s lower than Paypal’s 2.9% + $.30 transaction fees.

I left the hair salon amazed by the card reader, but I forgot about it for a few months until it finally hit me that the majority of people don’t carry much cash on them, and they sure don’t carry their checkbook with them.  I decided to give the Square Card Reader a shot.  I ordered one online and received it in the mail a few days later.

It was easy to set up.  No merchant account was needed.  I just entered my bank account information on the Square website, and I was set.

It ended up coming in handy when I was at a client’s office.  She was pressed for time, and she didn’t have her checkbook handy to pay for website updates.  That’s when I decided to pull out the card reader.  I ran her card, she signed with her finger on my smartphone, and I had a receipt sent to her email all in a minute or two.  The payment deposited in my account in just two days.

I teach private MMA, Boxing, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu lessons on the side, and the Square Card Reader has come in handy a few times with my private lesson clients as well.  I’m a fan of it.

Wufoo makes creating and designing forms easy.  No HTML or server side programming knowledge is needed.  They handle all of the processing.

Creating form fields is as easy as clicking a button and typing in the name of the form field.  You can insert text fields, checkboxes, dropdown boxes, multiple choice fields and much more!  You can insert these fields into your website quicker than any HTML whiz can if you’re using Wufoo.  If you need to rearrange your form fields, all you have to do is drag them to the spot you want them in.  Take a look at the video below to see how easy it is to make a form with Wufoo.

You can even set conditions with Wufoo like if you don’t want a field to show up unless the visitor chose a particular option on another field.  Best of all, Wufoo has a free account which gives you up to three forms with 10 fields each.  If you need a larger form that that, their paid plans start out at $14.95/month.  With this plan, you can insert file upload fields if you require your visitors to upload documents.  Starting with the $29.95/month paid plan, you can even take payment with a Wufoo form!

I’m a huge fan of Wufoo, and I use a Wufoo form on my site as well as many of my client’s websites.  Give them a shot today!

Not only does good copy sell, but it can help with your search engine rankings as well.  Writing good copy takes time, and you can’t just whip it up in a few seconds.  It requires thought.  Copywriters can spend hours and hours writing and rewriting copy until they feel its right.  If you spent hours and hours on your website copy, you wouldn’t feel so swell if someone just copied and pasted it on their website.

That’s where Copyscape comes in.  Copyscape will scan the web for any websites out there that have duplicated your content, and if you’re the person who is duplicating someone’s original content, Copyscape will find you.  To see for yourself, just go to Copyscape, type in your URL, and it will find all of the websites who’s content matches yours.

If someone’s copied your content, you could send them an email requesting them to take the duplicate content down.  What if they say no?  Go to DMCA.com and have them take the duplicate content down.  It’s not free, so try contacting the person who copied your content first.  If seeing is believing, then this video will help.

Another precaution to take would be to sign up for a Sucuri Account. You can scan your website to see if it is infected with any malware on their website.  If it is, you may want to remove the infected file.

If you have an account with Sucuri, you just have to give them your FTP information, so they can quarantine your infected file, and replace it with a good one.  You can get an account from them for as little as $89.99/year.

If you have your documents and emails stored remotely, you’ll be protected against these mishaps.  Here are some tools that I use for remote storage:

This is a big necessity for me.  Dropbox will sync all of your files on all of your computers, so if you have the same file on multiple computers, you only have to worry about updating it once.  You can install a Dropbox folder on each of your company’s computers.  You can even access your important files where Dropbox is not installed.  Just log in to your account to access your files.  Dropbox has a free account with up to 2 GB of storage, but I use the paid plan because I need more.  It has saved me before.  One time, my hard drive crashed, and I had to travel to Illinois the next day to work on a website.  Dropbox saved my ass.  I only needed to buy another hard drive, reinstall Dropbox, and download all of my important files from the Dropbox server.  If I didn’t have Dropbox, I would have lost all of my files.  God bless Dropbox.

If you use Gmail, then you’ll love Google Apps.  I was tired of receiving countless spam emails.  Since I made the switch to Google Apps, 99% of my spam has been cut out.  In addition to the spam being cut out, I can access my Inbox from anywhere.  Google Apps also uses the Google Calendar.  What’s even better is that I can sync my email and my calendar with my Android phone.  I swear by Google Apps.  You can get started with Google Apps for free as well with up to 10 user accounts.

I got tired of writing all of my passwords down and remembering them, so I wanted to find a place where I could securely store my passwords online.  Passpack comes with triple layer security.  That means you have a password, you have to click on a certain spot once you log in, and you have to enter your phrase to get through.  After a few minutes of inactive, your account locks up, and you have to enter your phrase to access your passwords again.  Passpack has plans ranging from free all the way up to $40/month.  You can share passwords with multiple employees.

I swear by these three online tools and they bring me peace of mind.  What kind of tools do you use to back up your data and emails?

With the usage of remote / cloud storage becoming a huge part of the internet these days, make sure you have the proper cloud computing security program to keep unwanted computer attacks off your computer.

Image courtesy of purpleslog on Flickr.

If you do decide to post on Craigslist, just be careful. If you don’t get a good feeling from talking with them, then trust your gut and don’t do business with them.

• Backlink Watch doesn’t require you install anything, but it is loaded with advertisements.  Nevertheless, it does the job and will give you the website that is linking to you along with the text used in the link.
• Link Diagnosis doesn’t have all of the advertisments that Backlink Watch has, but it requires that you install a plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser.  If you don’t us Mozilla Firefox to browse the web, you can install it.  It’s my web browser of choice.

It’s important to have keywords that you want to rank for appear in the links to your website.  What do I mean by this?  In my case, a link that says Web Design in Atlanta, GA is more powerful than a link that says www.mrtechnique.com.

Search engines results weigh heavily on one way links from relevant sites.  It’s a website’s online reputation.  That’s how search engine spiders travel from one website to another.

For my personal training side gig, I have three domain names registered.  I have my main domain name, Fightaholic.com, and I have two domain names, NewnanMMA.com and AtlantaMMALessons.com, that are forwarded to Fightaholic.com.  Did you follow that?  I hope so.  NewnanMMA.com and AtlantaMMALessons.com both have keywords that I would like to rank for in the domain name.  I’ve gotten many leads from the NewnanMMA.com domain name.  I give MMA lessons in the Newnan, GA area, and Newnan and MMA are both in the first domain name.

You could also use your other domain names to point to other pages of your website.  If you own a dentistry, you could purchase the name TeethWhiteningAtlanta.com and have it go to a page on your website that discusses the teeth whitening process.  If you are a plastic surgeon, you could purchase the name BuckheadLiposuction.com and have it go to your liposuction page.  Both of the names I just mentioned have keywords in them.

You could track how the names are doing to see if you want to keep the name or not by checking your Google Analytics account or whatever you use to check your website stats.  If the name isn’t producing for you, then you can just drop it the next year.

If you want to do a search for some domain names, go to AjaxWhoIs.com.  It’s quick and it’s painless on this website.

Image courtesy of ivanpw on Flickr

Don’t have a QR Code?  You can do a search for QR Codes, but I’ll help you out by giving you a link to one right here.  Suppose you have a service or product that isn’t on your home page.  Instead of displaying the whole URL (e.g. www.yoursite.com/service-category/service.php), you can just generate a QR Code for your visitors to scan.

You need a smartphone to scan QR codes, and you also need the app.  Most of the T-Mobile new cell phones are smartphones that already have the QR Code Scanner app installed.