Do your Webinars with Glance

If you do (or are planning to do) webinars then check out Glance. Once you have downloaded the software to your computer you can allow up to a 100 people to connect to your computer so that you can demomstrate for example, setting up an account on Facebook, installing a Wordpress theme and so on. Free phone conferencing is available with every account. You can see and control participants' screens.

To enable people to join your webinar either provide them with a code which enables them to access your Glance web page or they can connect directly from your web site. Guests can also join sessions via a web page that Glance hosts, but which looks like your own web site. For this there is a one time set-up fee but... when their session ends, they'll see another page that you can customize with a Call to Action and links to your web site or landing pages. Awesome for when you have an e book or teleseries that you want to encourage people to purchase.

If you want guests to see you then just power up your webcam, put it in "preview" mode so you can see yourself and your guests will be able to see you too. You can always hide the window from time to time if you want to.

You can record the session using Camtasia for example. This captures what's on your screen along with your voice. After your session is over, use Camtasia to edit the content and publish it on your website, You Tube or use as a bonus when you sell one fo your information products or systems.

Glance claim that in tests, Glace starts nearly three times faster than GoToMeeting® and WebEx®. They currently have a free trial which I am going to use to show a personal friend of mine how to make good use of Facebook. If any of you want to sit in on that one hour session let me know and I will send you the time and date and connection details. Just leave a comment on the this blog post.

Glance have done a cute video cartoon to demonstrate it:

So you think you own your website ???

I read a seriously worrying post on Karyn Greenstreet's blog today about how to be absolutely sure that you own the website you hired someone to produce for you.

She was talking in the context of US law but I think we should all read her post and the associated articles and then go and find out what the applicable law is in the country where we do business.

But here's another thought: what law applies ? The law of the country where your business is based or the law of the country where the web designer is based ? and if the latter then what happens if they outsource to a designer based in yet another country - given the extensive use of Elance for outsourcing these days ???

Karyn's post is: Who own's your website ?

How to shine as a radio host

A few weeks ago I did the Insider Tips on How to shine as a radio guest program by Lorraine Cohen. My motive was partly that I was developing a series of teleseminars on various aspects of starting and growing a business and had decided to present the teleclasses in an interview format and I had been invited by Lisa Hartwell as a guest on her radio show.

The program, Insider Tips on How to shine as a radio guest by broadcaster and life coach,Lorraine Cohen is really excellent and I can whole heartedly recommend it. The next program kicks off on May 26th. To read more click here.

There is a F.R.E.E. 60 minute preview call on Wednesday May 6th 2009, 6-7 pm EST/3-4 pm PST that you may wish to sign up for.

As both a host and guest, Lorraine has participated in over 150 programs that have been heard and downloaded by so many people around the world. Contributing as both host and guest has taught her so mcuh about how best to deliver a message that is informative, distinctive, and most of all, memorable.

If you're serious about expanding your market by positioning yourself as a radio guest expert, this program is for you.

If you follow the 5-week program you'll learn tips to:

• Distinguish yourself as a great guest so that hosts will want to invite you back again and again

• Develop confidence in talking about your passions

• Avoid some common mistakes to create raving listeners

• Generate income and build your opt- in lists

• Create instant connections with any audience

How do YOU spend your time ?

Want to keep track on where you spend your time when you are on line ? Then sign up for F.R.E.E. access to Rescue Time. There is also options that are not free but ....

RescueTime enables you to know exactly what software and sites you’re actively using. If you have staff you can also see where they are spending time - there are various privacy settings which can be applied.

Click here to check it out and sign up. RescueTime.

Carbonite - or backing up your e-business

Have just found out about Carbonite, a company providing unlimited online back up protection for a mere $49.95 a year. All you have to do is sign up, download the software, install it, run through the set up choosing what you want it to back up, set it, and that's it. They even offer a 14 day Free Trial.

Carbonite basically installs a small application on your computer that works quietly in the background looking for new and changed files that need to be backed up. When your computer is idle, Carbonite automatically backs up your new and changed files. You don't have to do anything! When you're using your computer, Carbonite goes to sleep so it will never slow you down or interfere with your Internet connection.All your files are encrypted twice before leaving your PC and they remain encrypted at Carbonite secure data centers, so only you can see your files.

So, if you accidentally delete or lose a files it takes just a few clicks on your desktop to get them back. If your computer is damaged, stolen or dies and you lose all your files, a visit to Carbonite’s website from a new computer and they can be retrieved in no time.

For those stay-at-homes who copy to DVD this is not a service they need but for those of you who work from many locations it can be a godsend. I am currently in the UK, had to have my laptop cleaned and reinstalled but a lot of my back-up was in Canada....

I am heading over to Carbonite right now !!

Folding your T- shirt..

... or a Time Saving Tip for Nomadic Entrepreneurs.

This amused me and it is really practical too. How to fold a T shirt in 2 seconds. Click here.

Tube Mogul - for those of you using video to sell your business

TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving people who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. Basically TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give people wanting to post business-related videos an improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what's hot and what's not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence. Yes, its F.R.E.E.

Sites that TubeMogul supports include: AOL Video - Blip.tv — Google Video — Myspace - Yahoo Video - YouTube and quite a few more.

Tiny URL

I just went to TinyURL and typed in the URL for an article I co-authored a few years ago (on Human Rights and Music if you really want to know !) it gave me this as a shortened URL http://tinyurl.com/57aamg which is a lot shorter than the real URL:
http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm10-2/universalite-musique-en.htm

I'm sure you have seen these little URLs especially if you use Facebook or Twitter.TinyURL is the most commonly used of these services to shorten long URLs.

The advantages of a shortened URL are:

- URL's are embedded in an e-mail message if they are very long can be spread over two lines and can be off putting.

- Twitter only allows you 140 characters so you don't want to be using up valuable space with a very long URL.

- On Facebook you have a limited space for your "Status" entry so again you don't want to take up valuable space with a very long URL.

Of course for people reading the URL there is no indication where it is going to take them whereas a longer URL can give you a clue to the destination. Having said that would you have guessed that the URL I used as an example would have lead you to an article on Music and Human Rights ?

At the end of the day its all down to the reader having confidence in the person that sent it to them or who is using it in their Twitter Tweet or their Facebook status.

Time Snapper

TimeSnapper is an Automatic Screenshot Journal. It runs in the background of your computer, taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds all week long.

Use TimeSnapper to:

- Keep track of your time using the screenshots and note recording. Useful for anyone who charges by the hour (e.g. consultants, lawyers, technicians)
- Track time spent in each program or the computer (see report)
- Measure your productivity using the Productivity Calculator
- Get a scorecard with a grade every day! Use it to improve yourself
- Use the Note Reminder / Auto-popup to remind you to write down notes throughout the day (without getting knocked out of the zone)
- Recover lost data easily by extracting text from the screenshots *
- Make sure no one is using your computer without your knowledge

And.... its F.R.E.E. Download it clicking here.

Desk Top Publishing

I've just come across a free, open source software package for desktop publishing - Scribus. Really useful if you're getting into producing information products. I have downloaded it but not used it yet. Will report back when I have.

Who's visiting your blog ?

If you look at the right hand side of my blogs you will find that I have added a widget from feedjit.com - Live Traffic Feed which shows who has visited. It shows what country and also by what means they got to my blog. This is providing me with some interesting information on visiters. I have also added MyBlogLog which shows me which MyBlogLog members have been to my blog.

Tag Biz - Application on Facebook

I discovered this the other day - haven't had time to test drive it yet but I hear from business associates that it is worth looking at.

Tag Biz is designed to network for you saving you time and expanding your business network. Tag Biz automates the relationship networking and referral process by placing a custom business keyword tag cloud on your Facebook profile and on the Facebook profiles of your friends that are participating in your business network. You need to pick your keywords, invite your friends and then using Tag Biz you can build your own business network. Your business will automatically be listed in the Tag Biz business directory which has over 7000 listed businesses and in June 2008 received over 125,000 visits making it the largest and most active business directory on Facebook. Click here to sign up to add it to your Facebook page.

Let me know how it works for your business.

Commenting on Blogs

It is widely preached that commenting on other people's blogs is a good way to build a reputation as an expert and to drive some traffic to your own blog. However, even if you have your hot list of favourite blogs because they are relevant to your business you are almost certainly missing out on commenting opportunities.

So... what's to be done ?

Answer - download Comment Kahuna free of charge.

And what is Comment Kahuna ? it searches for blog posts that rank in Google for a particular phrase. Once you’ve typed in your keyword phrase it will locate up to 50 blog posts on the topic you’ve searched for that are ranking in Google.

Stumble Upon

For a really useful guide to using Stumble Upon to drive traffic to your website sign up for a series of F.R.E.E. lessons put out by Caroline Middlebrook. They can be found at www.stumblerush.com. Caroline is on Facebook and also has a very useful blog packed full of helpful suggstions and advice and refreshingly honest.

RACI

What is RACI? At its most basic it is a way to examine a process step, task, activity, effort, decision or inspection to determine who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted or Informed.

RACI Benefits:

- Helps clarify activities and tasks in a process
- Determines ownership
- Clarifies roles and responsibilities
- Eliminates duplication of effort
- Identifies gaps ie steps in the process that are not owned
- Reduces misunderstandings
- Improves communication - make sure people are not 'left out'
- Provides a cross-functional view for all employees

Definitions:
R = Responsible - The person who performs the action/task.
A = Accountable - The person who is held accountable that the action/task is completed.
C = Consulted - The person(s) who is consulted before performing the action/task.
I = Informed - The person(s) who is informed after the action/task is performed.

Creating a RACI chart
Set up a matrix with major tasks/activities as the rows and key positions (or named individuals) as column headers. Cells are designated with an R, A C or I, as appropriate, to indicate the role an individual plays.

Analysing a RACI chart
A RACI chart should be analysed by looking at rows and columns. Here are just some things to look out for:

Columns- Each vertical column should have one Responsible, but can have more in some situations of shared responsibility.
- If a column has more than one R perhaps the task should be subdivided
- No empty spaces in a column - Does this person need to be involved in every step?
- No A's or R's - Should this role be eliminated from this process? Has the process changed over time where they may not be needed? Try to eliminate.
- many A's - Is this person a bottleneck? Can these tasks be shared or segregated?

Rows
- Too many A's in a row can be an indicator of impending confusion since no one will be sure who really had the task and each individual will probably have a different approach and/or expectation(s).
- No R's in a row - this is where gaps occur and a task may not be performed
- With too many R's in a row an overlap can occur.
- Completely empty row - Why was this function included? Are we missing including them when they should be? Can the function be correctly eliminated form the process?

- The number of Consults should be minimised so that the decision-making process is not slowed down
- If there are too many I's this can be adminsitratively onerous - possibly some people only need to be informed if exceptional circumstances occur.

Click here for an example of a RACI chart.

Build a blog with WordPress

Sorry blogspot !!! Perhaps not politically correct !! But...

I found the blog of Caroline Middlebrook yesterday and she has produced a great e- book on using WordPress to build a blog that can be monetised. Its downloadable and F.R.E.E.

Incoming Links

What is an incoming link ? each time you link from within your own site to another page of your site, it counts as a link. And each time you link from one of your sites to another, it's an incoming link.

Why are incoming links important ? Incoming links are one of the most important keys to good search engine rankings. You can’t have enough of them.

How can you check how many incoming links your website or blog has ? The easiest way is to use Link Popularity.com. Type in your URL, then click - and you'll see links to each of the three major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo). Click on each and all the internal links will be listed. Note how many the site has.

Check out your competitors by going to Google, key in one of the keywords from your own website. Note the UTLs for the top 5 websites that come up in the search and then type each one in turn into LinkPopularity. Note how many these sites have. Then you’ll know what to aim for.

Of course if you are already on the first page..... keep up the good work !!

If you use Gmail... some search tips

If you don't get a ton of mail, just typing in the words you're looking for usually does the trick. I can just type lisa in the search box and get all of the messages from my friend Lisa, southwest to bring up my ticket confirmations, or "bank statement" to help get my finances in order.

But the real power of Gmail search lies in search operators -- words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO. Likewise:

A link from my co-worker Michael: from:michael http
A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
That last chat I had with one of the Gmail product managers: keith is:chat
All messages from ebay that aren't outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don't contain the word that follows it)
The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven't read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox

You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well. And you can get pretty fancy. Recently, I was trying to remember the date of my friend's April birthday. I always send her a birthday email, so I searched to:maya (birthday OR bday) after:2007/4/1 before:2007/5/1. It's the 19th.

Extracted from: How to find any email with Gmail search, posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager, Tuesday, May 06, 2008 8:28 AM

Market Research - Tracking buzzes

TRACKING BUZZ ACROSS SOCIAL NETWORKS, FORUMS AND TRENDY WEBSITES

Meta Search Engines are under-the-radar rivals of Google Blog Search and Technorati. Sometimes they have gems the bigger guys don't. A few:

Clusty enables searches for news, images, wikipedia articles and blogs.
Serph tracks buzz in real-time. Search for a product, company name or person. It will include results from blogs, news aggregators, social bookmarking sites (such as Magnolia and del.icio.us), image sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites.
Zuula searches multiple sites at the same time. Run a web query; results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Mahalo and other search sites will be separately tabbed for easy perusal.
Nielsen BrandPulse. This enables you to tap into forums, boards, Usenet newsgroups and blogs that may be discussing your company, brand or product.

Google Trends. What's more popular: The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? Google Trends lets you pit them against each other and graph the results. A broader product, Google Zeitgeist, tracks what users are querying most on the Google search engine.

Facebook Lexicon counts mentions of words and phrases on Facebook users' profiles. Like Google trends, keywords can be pitted against each other (just separate them with a comma). For an example, see Clinton vs. Obama.

TweetScan enables users to search for product or company mentions in real-time across Twitter.com, a website that is popular with early adopters and tech lovers. Also see Twitterverse, which gives you a sense of commonly-tweeted topics of the day; Intwition, which tracks links shared on Twitter; and TweetClouds, which builds tag clouds based on your query. More tools for sifting through Twitter data, or tracking brand buzz on Twitter, are in this article.

BoardTracker lets marketers search for mentions in discussion boards. The homepage also features a dynamic tag cloud, so you can find out what products, brands and topics people are discussing most today.

Google Groups and Yahoo Groups let marketers sift through discussions occurring on, namely, Google or Yahoo Groups.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.

Market Research - Searching blogs

Google Blog Search enables searchers to sift through blog postings. Like typical search results, blog posts are ranked by relevance to your query. Like a regular web search, you may use Boolean commands. Advanced Blog Search lets you limit results to words in the blog title, posts at a certain URL, author name, dates written and language.

The order of results can also be changed by date and time — so you can see the newest postings first.

Caution: Google only indexes blog content from blog RSS feeds. That means Google Blog Search excludes blogs that do not generate a feed. What's more, some blogs only syndicate the title and first paragraph of their posts, further limiting your results.

Other tips: consider mining non-English data when exploring Google Blog Search. As of April 2007, 37 percent of all blog posts were written in Japanese. If you're willing to consider an outside vendor to manually track and translate non-English data on your behalf, Ogilvy PR and Edelman are two useful options.

Technorati Advanced Search. Since its launch in 2003, Technorati has focused on indexing blogs and other social media. Like Google, it has a proprietary ranking system: the perceived "authority" of a site is provided beside each result.

Advanced Search enables you to query for "all blogs" containing your search, "blogs about" your search or posts from a certain URL.

Technorati also enables Tag Search, which checks your query against the "tags" bloggers assign to their posts. Flickr photos and YouTube videos are also "tagged" by authors. Technorati searchers may terrace queries by blogs, photos, or videos.

If you query by tag, Technorati will also provide related tags that may be useful to you.

Do not overlook the Technorati Blog Directory. Instead of searching blog posts by the keywords they contain or by their tags, the blog directory lets you sift through blog descriptions, written by creators or authors.

Caution: Like Google Blog Search, Technorati only indexes some blogs, not all. And while searching by tag or directory description is useful, you are relying heavily on the ability of bloggers to honestly and accurately describe their own content.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.