When I was doing some research for a blog post about Skype, I came across this video. If you’ve never used Skype, it explains how it works and what you can do with it.
Or you can go to YouTube and watch it.
And keep your eyes open for my next post about how I use Skype. It’s a little different than how others use it.
Andrea J. Stenberg
If you have lots of meetings during the week – even virtual or telephone meetings – scheduling them can be a headache. The “you’re it” back and forth emails trying to book a time is a pain in the rear. I’ve been trying to find a way to make it easier. There are several online tools but each person has to be a member to use them. And they don’t always work so well.
When my RSS reader popped up with t Tungle.me I was skeptical. However, after watching the video I’m ready to give it a try.
Or you can watch it here.
I confess I haven’t used it much yet, but it’s very easy. The best feature, in my opinion is that users don’t have to have a Tungle account in order to schedule a meeting with me. And Tungle syncs with my Google Calendar so everything should work.
I’m still test driving this but I think (hope) it will cut down on the email tag for scheduling appointments.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Let me know what you think of this, or other tools.
Last week I had a heart-stopping moment. It started out as a normal day. I was logging into the admin section of the blog and was notified that my password was incorrect. Since I have my password saved on my desktop machine, rather than typing it in manually, I was somewhat puzzled but I re-typed the password.
Still no go.
So I calmly clicked the “forgot my password” link. WordPress sent me an email with a link to change my password. I went to my inbox and clicked the link. I was then told I’d get a second email with my new, temporary password.
I waited.
And waited.
No new password.
So I tried again. Got the email with the link to change my password, but never received a new password.
Panic started to set in.
Then I remembered I’d had a friend look at the back-end of my blog when I’d had a problem with something. Problem solved! I asked if he remembered the password I gave him.
No.
Scrolled through our Skype chats to see if it was recorded there.
No dice.
My friend suggested Read More→
A very important, and often overlooked, task for any small business owner is to monitor your analytics. Where is your website traffic coming from, where are they landing on your site, when are they leaving.
Particularly if you have a blog, it is important to notice what blog posts attract the most attention and which blog posts cause people to leave. When you do this, you can decide to write more blog posts about popular topics. You can also look at posts that cause people to leave and work on ways to get them to stick around longer.
One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate Google Analytics with your website or blog. Go into your Google Account, sign up for Google Analytics, and add the code to your site. (Read my previous post about Google Analytics).
While the information supplied by Google is astounding, unless you log into Google frequently and check your stats, it really isn’t helping you. That’s what I found I was doing – or rather not doing. I have Analytics set up, but I wasn’t using it frequently enough.
Then I discovered 
the Google Analytics Dashboard WordPress Widget. This WordPress plugin allows me to have my Analytics stats right on my blog’s dashboard. Whenever I log in, one of the first things I see is my stats.
I see when my traffic is coming in, and how much. I also see the blog posts that are getting the most traffic.
When I go to the edit posts page, I can see which days traffic has come in and how many left right away.
Now, I don’t have an excuse for not monitoring my stats. I can see a quick snapshot each day. And if I see a trend I want to know more about, I can log into Google Analytics and dig deeper.
Andrea J. Stenberg
LinkedIn has created an application to connect your LinkedIn connections with your Outlook inbox. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook for your email, and want the two connected you need to download and install the Outlook Social Connector and the LinkedIn Outlook Connector.
Once you’ve done that, information about people in your LinkedIn network will appear at the bottom of emails from that person. Things like who they’re connecting with, when they’ve updated their profile and their status updates may appear. A separate LinkedIn folder is created in Outlook for your LinkedIn connections. You’ll now have names, addresses and photos of all your connections in your email client.
Based on the comments on the LinkedIn blog, some people don’t like having the separate folder because they’ve already got their connections added to Outlook. However, it will be handy for future connections. You won’t have to import them, they’ll already be in your email client.
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may know that I use Mozilla Thunderbird rather than Outlook. When I hear about tools like this, I once again start questioning my decision to use a tool that is not the most popular one. Although there are many benefits to Thunderbird, sometimes – like now – I wonder if I made the right decision.
Anyway, here’s a video explaining how it all works.
Or you can watch it directly from YouTube.
Since I can’t give this a test drive myself, I’d love to hear from anyone who has tried it out. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Andrea J. Stenberg
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