An Inexpensive Business Phone and Fax Option
For as little as $9.95/month, VoiceNation will give you a phone number which will call multiple phones at once. Suppose you run a sales team. You could use this number to dial every salesperson’s phone in the office to make sure everybody receive a fair shot at picking up the sale.
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. (more…)
Take credit card payments on your phone
I don’t carry much cash around with me these days. I use my debit card most of the time to pay for most items. It’s convenient, and I get to rack up points on my debit card when I buy something.
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. (more…)
Have your website form your way with Wufoo
I’m not too fond off designing website forms. I’m even less fond of the server side programming needed to process a website form, until a friend who also designs websites told me to check out Wufoo.
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. (more…)
See who is copying your content with Copyscape
Copy plays a crucial part in a website. The graphics play an important part as well in establishing the feeling a visitor gets when they visit your website, but good copy is what sells your product or service.
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. (more…)
Keeping Your WordPress Site Safe
WordPress is the most popular CMS around, so it’s a big target for hackers. Be creative with naming your passwords. You can check out the 25 Worst Passwords in 2011. If your password is on this list, you might want to change it.
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.
Remote Storage
You may want to consider having your important documents and emails stored online. What happens if your place burns down or if your computers crash? For years, I thought about a solution to this. I didn’t want to lose all of my data and have to start all over again.
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: (more…)
Free Advertising on Craigslist
Have you ever been on the website? You can post an ad on there at no cost to you. I started posting on Craigslist a couple of weeks ago and had someone contact me about getting their website designed. One of my good friends sells mattresses around Atlanta and generates most of his business through Craigslist. I’ve also used Craigslist to advertise my personal training services as well and generated a lead. Give it a try. It only takes a few minutes to post an ad.
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.
Who links to your competitors?
One way to get links is to find out who is linking to your competitors. Recently, I just stumbled upon two backlink checkers, Backlink Watch and Link Diganosis.
- 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. (more…)
Purchase Additional Domain Names and Forward Them
If you want your website to be accessed by multiple domain names, then you can. Having multiple domain names will give your visitors more ways to find you.
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. (more…)
QR Codes
QR Codes stand for Quick Response Codes. More people are browsing the internet with their cellphones, and typing up a website address is more tedious with a phone. If you have a QR Code scanner, you don’t have to type in a website address. You just scan the code, and you’re either taken directly to that page or you’re given the URL to click on. (more…)
