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May

Essential Tools featuring Tammy Lenski

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This week’s Essential Tools series features Dr. Tammy Lenski, conflict management specialist, author and consultant who also happens to be a very successful blogger (at Conflict Zen). Tammy is also the co-founder of the Mediation Business Summit virtual conference, where I will be speaking in September on the topic of website essentials for small businesses.

Like many small business owners, Tammy’s business has to be ready to run from anywhere – on the road, in a client’s office, in a home office or anywhere she happens to be that day. As a result, the majority of her business is run in the “cloud” (here is a great article from one of my essential tools, FreshBooks, with 3 Reasons Your Business Needs to Run in Cloud).

In her own words, Tammy’s essential tools for running a small business in the cloud…

I default to tools that I can use cross-platform from wherever I am (I travel a lot for business), so I prefer the cloud (with good backup mechanisms) and apps that have companion iPhone apps. These are the ones I use every day:

Highrise: I use it for client relationship management and as my task manager — all emails to and from clients end up here, as do notes from client calls and visits, along with documents. I can tell in an instant what I need to do next for a client or project and I can give my assistant access for when clients call and I’m not in the office.

Dropbox: I have several MacBook Pros and an iPhone and want to spend zero time remembering to sync. Dropbox takes care of it all for me and I can get any files I need from wherever I am. It’s saved me in a pinch more than a few times!

Evernote: I use it for, well, everything. Hotel and flight confirmations, notes for speeches, screen grabs of websites I like, gardening ideas, you name it. It really is my external brain.

WordPress with StudioPress: I love the ease and extensibility of WordPress and customize my sites myself using Brian Gardner’s terrific, powerful themes as the design foundation.

Google Voice: I work all over the place – office, home, hotel rooms, on-site while visiting a corporate client. Google Voice helps make me accessible, sends me my messages as texts for quick reviewing, and automatically knows to send business calls to voicemail during evenings and weekends.

Google Apps for Business: Mostly use Gmail and Calendar, both syncing to my iPhone.

Chrome: It’s light and fast and since I do so much of my office work using the cloud, it’s a timesaver, even with the Mac version still in beta I’m loving it.

Thanks Tammy for giving us a glimpse into your business and how the sky (I mean the cloud) is limit!

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May

Essential Tools of ProBlogger Community Manager Lara Kulpa

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I have said it before, but will say it again… one of the reasons I love my Essential Tools series so much is that it gives me a chance to reconnect with and learn more about my favorite Internet Pros. This week is no exception! ProBlogger Community Manager Lara Kulpa and I have been “running in the same circles” since our b5media days, but I had never really had a conversation with her – until today – and it was like we had known each other forever. We are both total geek girls with way too many similarities to mention.

As the community manager for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger forum, Lara spends a lot of her time answering questions, working on ways to make the ProBlogger community more beneficial for its members and doing interviews. She is also the Assistant Editor at TwiTip, runs Ginkgo Consulting and has niche blog sites of her own, too.

Lara’s essential tools for online success include:

Skype – Since Lara is based in the US and Darren and another board moderator are in Australia, Skype is absolutely a critical piece of her communication tool set. She also uses Skype when doing interviews for its built-in recording capabilities.
All things Google. Lara is a self-proclaimed Google addict. From Google Docs to Gmail and everything in between, Lara would be lost without the big G. She did share a cool feature in Google Labs that lets you create email “canned” responses that are incredible time savers if you find yourself needing to send the same responses frequently.
WordPress is her blogging and web development platform of choice.
When it comes to coding, Lara is a girly girl (like me) and wants everything neat and pretty! She uses Edit Plus in conjunction with FileZilla FTP for truly efficient file management. She can open files from within Filezilla to edit directly in Edit Plus. Once the edits are made, the file is save and returned to the server via Filezilla.
And for graphics, Lara is a Photoshop fan.

Thanks Lara for the opportunity to reconnect and get a glimpse into what you use to manage your very busy and successful online world!

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Apr

Essential Tools of Chris Cree

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This week’s Essential Tools features one of my long time friends, Chris Cree. Chris was one of the founders of SOBCon (and like me, he is totally bummed he couldn’t make it up to Chicago this weekend for it!). Chris is a new media speaker and systemizer, which means he has the tech skills to create user friendly systems for small businesses to power up their marketing efforts by effectively tapping into new media. And more than that, he can translate the geek-speak into normal language so people can understand not only what they need to do to be effective, but why they should be doing it.

Chris came into this business through the blogging door and has been working with WordPress for several years. His primary company is SuccessCREEations, Inc. He offers free video tips on ChrisCree.TV and has just launched a video training site to help businesses get started in social media at NewMediaProfitPath.com.

If you are Mac based, you are in for a treat as Chris shares his essential tools for success – in his own words.

Mac OS X – When I launched my business three years ago I made the strategic choice to move to Mac’s from Windows machines. I hesitated to move to Mac’s because I thought Windows was for business. In retrospect I am so glad I made the move from the get-go. There was a bit of a learning curve transition where things seemed more complicated. But once I made it over that hump it has been a huge productivity boost for me. Routine maintenance is just that – routine. I now have 4 Macs in my business and in the three years I don’t think they’ve locked up a total of 3 times combined. I can focus on working rather than troubleshooting my computers. (And no, I don’t have an iPhone or an iPad.)
Google Apps – I’ve been using Google Apps, Standard Edition from the very beginning. It’s like having a Gmail account with email for your domain. Being able to share Google Docs with my team is very handy. We can edit a doc simultaneously, very handy for remote meetings. I coordinate everything in my Google Calendar. A new feature they just added is Short Links, which is like having my own private URL shortener. It’s very handy for links that we share on a regular basis like our strategic referral partners and affiliate programs.
Office Time (Mac & Windows versions) – This has been a life saver as far as tracking actual time spent on client. In the beginning I was way undercharging for my work because I didn’t track my time. Office Time has allowed me to fix that, and made my business more profitable as a result. We just click on the project in Office Time when we start and stop working on it and the program will tally the time for us.
JungleDisk (Mac & Windows) – Offsite backups of your critical data is a MUST. I’m too embarrassed to admit how long I ran my business without doing this. Fortunately I got set up with Jungle Disk before I had any data loss. It ties into your Amazon S3 storage account and only costs $4 per month per business user, plus storage and bandwidth to Amazon. That’s incredibly inexpensive insurance should you have a major data loss event such as a hard drive crash, stolen computer, fire, or other natural disaster. We back up all our computers nightly via Jungle Disk. And we back up our project computers locally via Mac’s time machine to external storage drives. Oh, and between now and this June, Amazon isn’t charging any bandwidth fees for uploads so get all of your data uploaded to your S3 account now before the price goes up! And as a note, your first backup will take a long time, several days probably. But it is worth going through that because once you do subsequent backups usually only take a few minutes each.
1Password (Mac Only) – This password managing program is a lifesaver. It securely remembers all our logins for our social media profiles, client accounts, etc. Not only is it secure, but it allows us to securely share them between computers so all my passwords are always securely synced between my desktop and my laptop. And, because the program remembers the passwords for me I use much more secure passwords than I did when I had to remember them all.
PixelStick (Mac Only) - This handy tool lets me measure pixel distances on the screen, which is incredibly handy for the WordPress design work we do, expecially when troubleshooting people’s broken sites in our WordPress Support business. Just drag the ends of the measuring stick to the points you want to measure on your screen and the readout tells how many pixels are in between the ends.