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Services for QuickBooks 2007 to be Discontinued
After May 31, 2010 many of the services for QuickBooks 2007 will be discontinued by Intuit. Affected services for QuickBooks 2007 will be: Assisted Payroll, Basic Payroll, Enhanced Payroll, Standard Payroll, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, Billing Solution (formerly QuickBooks Online Billing), QuickBooks Email, Bill Pay, Online Banking, Credit Card Download, Technical Support Plans and Services. If you are using any of these services and want to continue, you will need to upgrade.
HTML Editor on a Budget
If you do minor editing of your clients’ web pages, html ezines/newsletters or like to tweak the coding in wordpress blog posts & pages but are on a budget, you may only be able to drool over Dreamweaver. Many people don’t know there are options out there other than hand coding in Notepad. Have you seen any of the products from Coffee Cup? I’ve used some of their products and have found them to be easy to work in and far less complicated than Dreamweaver. And best of all, they have a load of free stuff! And, what you do buy from them is much less expensive than their “name brand” competitors! For instance, as of the writing of this post, their HTML editor software is $49. For those of you who don’t even want to mess with code, they have a Visual Site Designer for $49 also. Of course, this isn’t going to turn you into a stellar web designer, but it can certainly make things a little easier for those of us who are not web designers!
Off-Site Backup Solution for QuickBooks
I was researching something earlier and ran across an interesting idea for backing up your QuickBooks file.
Set your QuickBooks to automatically backup every time you close it (make sure you’re using the data verification!!) and set it to save in your DropBox folder!
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, as I use DropBox and LOVE it! The free version comes with 2 MB of storage space, but honestly, I’m not anywhere even close to that right now (only using about 6% of my space).
Facebook Tagging for Business
Social Media Explorer recently wrote an excellent article about the new Facebook tagging feature and using it for business. Here’s a quick excerpt:
“For a business, this can allow you to stay more top of mind with your friends or fans. When you tag someone, they receive a notification you’ve done so and, thus, come see what you tagged them in. This is potentially very powerful for businesses. As the administrator of a fan page, when you tag someone in a wall post or note, it appears to them as if the business or organization tagged them, not the individual logged in to administer the account.”
Here’s a link to the original article. What are your thoughts?
Virtual Events Training
It is always exciting to uncover hot and profitable new niches to tap into for your Virtual Business. Well, Internet Marketing, Ecommerce Support and Social Media Marketing continue to be very in-demand” services niches and will continue to be for quite some time, I am particularly excited about this new niche emerging in the Virtual Event Industry.
I personally believe that the “Virtual Events” field is one of the hottest avenues to building your business right now, especially in this down economy. The statistics are clear: There is currently a significant increase in the number of participants attending virtual events such as webinars, tele-events, live podcasts and web TV shows. However, there is a corresponding decrease in those attending offline events and conferences partly due to the economy, but for a host of other reasons as wells. The reality is that Virtual Events are more cost-effective to deliver and attend, have the capacity to reach a larger audience and can be re-broadcast for continued exposure.
Businesses are keenly interested in running Virtual Events right now, but many lack the knowledge and time to effectively set-up and implement the Virtual Events successfully. As a result, this has presented a very timely and unque opportunity for Virtual Professionals to position themselves as a “Virtual Event Specialist”!
On September 16th, VAClassroom will be hosting a “must attend” event with Craig Cannings and Virtual Event Expert, Michelle Schoen titled,
“Building a Profitable Niche as a Virtual Event Specialist (Even in a Down Economy)!”
They will be exploring the crucial skills required to effectively deliver Virtual Event Set-up and Management services to your clients.
In addition, they will be sharing some exciting news on our upcoming training program: The Virtual Event Specialist Certification.
So, go ahead and click on the below link to watch a short 5 minute video and then sign-up to receive some special bonus information including more details on the upcoming event on September 16th!
Click Here: http://www.vaclassroom.com/virtual-event-specialist/
I Was in Napa Valley getting drunk over the weekend?! Really?!
I just had a conversation with a client who said she was happy to see that I was back from Napa Valley safely. I was confused and told her I hadn’t gone to Napa Valley. She said she thought she read on her Facebook page that I’d gone to Napa Valley and drank too much this weekend…and she was wondering why I went to Napa Valley for the weekend when I live in South Carolina!
Just goes to show that your clients, potential clients and colleagues ARE watching – but sometimes they are watching someone else! What if that client was totally put-off by the thought that I really was out boozing it up in Napa? What if that ONE message (that I didn’t even post) made them decide to cut me loose as their assistant because of what they THOUGHT I was doing because she was “skimming” her social network updates?
I’m glad she and I were able to have a laugh about this one, but it could have turned out differently. Scary.
Have you ever had something like that happen to you?
Alternate Office Locations and Living Life
There has been some conversation recently in my circle about “why I love my life”. Here are some of the reasons I love doing what I do.
I can work from my satellite office (deck) when the weather’s nice (like this morning) or the kids want to swim, auxiliary offices (kitchen table & couch) when I need to work but not necessarily without distraction, and my headquarters (upstairs office w/ desk, desktop computer, fax, scanner, laser printer, the whole 9 yards) when I really need to get down to business! And let’s not forget my alternate locations at my kid’s school, the library, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Books-a-Million and my father-in-law’s house in another state just to name a few! (Gotta love wi-fi!)
I can take time “away” to volunteer for the PTO/PTA, watch TV with my husband, go to my kid’s soccer game/practice, run errands, go to a doctor/dentist visit or just sit and play with my kids without having to ask for time off.
I get to do all this while helping other entrepreneurs be able to take the same time “away” to live THEIR lives without worrying about THEIR businesses. How great is that!?
Tweeting “For” a Client
I ran across this video on the VAclassroom blog today, and I thought it addresses tweeting for clients very well. It also doesn’t hurt that I also agree with the philosophy and guidelines he discusses in the video!
Twitter Verified Accounts
You may or may not have noticed that some of your favorite Twitter Celebrities have a nifty new icon on their profiles that “verifies” that are the real deal.
How to identify a verified account:
* The ‘Verified Account’ badge will appear in the top-right portion of a user’s profile page just above the name, location and bio.
* It will always have a badge followed by the words ‘Verified Account’. (This is clickable and as of this writing it points to http://twitter.com/help/verified)
* If the verified account badge appears anywhere else on a user’s profile page (e.g. in the avatar or the background) it is not a verified account
* The verified account badge will also appear next to usernames in the Find People section
* The verified account badge will have the same color as shown above even if users customize the background of their profile page or change the color in the sidebar
* See what a verified account looks like!
More information about Verified Accounts.
Email Marketing No-Nos
I received an email today from someone I had gotten a service quote from in the past (for my house). I received it in both my business email and my Gmail account (because I have my Gmail set up as a “back up” for my business account). I didn’t even look at it in my Outlook…simply deleted it because there was NO TEXT in the body of the email. However, Gmail has the thumbnail preview of attached images at the bottom of the emails, and I saw it was possibly a “legitimate” email, so I opened the full picture. As a result, I sat down and wrote the following email:
Hi [removed],
I received your email today with your [removed] Sunroom information. However, if I may offer some suggestions…
Sending an email to 436 people in a way where anyone receiving the email can view and save the email address of everyone else the email has been sent to is bad email etiquette. It’s very easy for someone to simply right click on a name and get the email address for every single person on your list. For example, I know that [removed name]’s email address is [removed]2001@aol.com simply by using that technique. And in Gmail, I don’t even have to go through all that trouble…I can just click on the “show details” link in my email and it will show the email addresses of everyone with a single click. Some people just don’t want their email addresses out there. And if someone has the option checked to “automatically add recipients to my contact list” in their email program and they click on “reply all” to your email…guess what, now all those people on your email are in that person’s contact list and are more susceptible to viruses and those incessantly forwarded email jokes and chain letters.
Sending that many emails at one time will many times get you flagged as a potential spammer by your Internet service provider as well as raise your SPAM score in SPAM filters…so your email might not even get seen by your customers and potential customers because it is much more likely to get filtered out by their SPAM filters.
Subject line. Most people do not open email where they do not understand the subject line. Your subject was “Emailing: Page Title”. That has no call to action and does not give the sender any information about what’s in the email.
No body text. There was not TEXT in your email stating WHO the email was from, what company, etc.
Only graphics in the email. Most email programs no longer show graphics unless the sender is added to your “safe sender” list or unless you physically click on the “show pictures” option. Again, if no one knows who it’s from and there’s no text in the message of the email to say who you are or what the email is about, so the odds of someone clicking on the option to see the picture to see what you have to say is slim since almost all the emails that have no text and only graphics are ads for “cheap pharmaceuticals” and porn.
Do you have a mechanism in place to see how many people actually opened your email, or are you just going on blind faith?
So, if I have all these reasons why no one would open the email, why did I open the email? I’ll tell you why…because this is what I do for a living…I manage email marketing campaigns for small business and entrepreneurs. And I’m interested in what even the “spam” is like. I learn from every email I receive – good and bad.
If you would like to continue with email campaigns, I would be happy to talk with you about how you can continue to send emails, track who opens them, and increase your “open rate” in the process, I’d be glad to talk with you to discuss how I could help [removed] Remodeling accomplish this.
Will I ever hear from this guy again? Will he even read my email? Will he take any action to help ensure his emails get read in the future? I don’t know.
