Filter provided by summaries:
Filter books before buying them – Executive summaries the perfect way to filter books before buying them.  They will save you time and money!

Amplifier provided by summaries:
Increase comprehension and retention – We learn in layers and an executive summaries help your mind prepare for each chapter and the entire book, and they also help crystallize the information when used for post chapter review.

Background

I am not a fast reader, but I still make the time and invest about 15 hours every week to further my understanding of business and marketing.  Since I was about seventeen years old, I have averaged about two books per week.  On a side note, my reading speed and comprehension has started to increase, now that I schedule time to improve it.  I supplement the books I read for videos and DVDs, when possible and appropriate, to increase my comprehension and retention of the information.

Going to the library is time prohibitive and therefore cost prohibitive for me, due to the hourly rate I assign to my activities.  I also tried using a runner to pick-up books for the local library, but quickly found that the new releases and many of the esoteric works I was after were not available or currently out of stock.  Buying lots of books was my only option until I discovered how to leverage executive summaries.

Discovery

Here is what I discovered: executive summaries can be leveraged to improve the process. The end result, I can learn more in less time, and save alittle bit of money as well.

It takes me about twenty minutes to read an executive summary.  This means I can read forty-five executive summaries in the time it takes me to read two books.  I do not read forty-five summaries per week though, not even close.  I use them as a filter, and then make the decision on whether to listen to the audio summary and/or buy the book.  This method of reading the summary as a successor to the blurb puts an additional filter between the blurb and the book.  The blurb is still useful, but it becomes one of two decision making factors.  I can choose to delve deeper into those books which seem interesting, even if they have totally rubbish blurbs; it happens!   The executive summaries can also be leveraged on the backend as well, as the basis from which to build notes to improve comprehension and retention.   After all, it’s not how fast you can read but how much you can retain and then apply.

Research

Not all executive summary services are created equal.   I know this because I have tested several executive summary services.  I compared them to each other and choose summaries of books I had already studied.  While the framework of the summaries was constant, the quality of them was not.

• Some services missed key points and concepts that I felt were key.
• The amount of summaries in their library, type of summaries, and the number of new ones that are created each week is another area where the services could be differentiated easily.
• The number of summaries in their library and number produced each month was also a major decision making factor after quality.
• Another area that I used to differentiate the services was value added services (e.g. audio summary, eReader file, and more).
  • Most offered service’s like these, but the quality of the audio presentation both in presentation and fidelity varied, provider to provider; for some the audio summaries felt like a complete after thought.

After completing my research, I purchased a subscription to GetAbstract whose tagline is fittingly ‘compressed knowledge’.  I also called and chatted w/ one of GetAbstract’s founders.  It may interest you to know that, one of the main reasons they started the company is to make business knowledge more accessible around the world aka for people who don’t speak English or America which ever you prefer.  This is a noble goal that reminds me of just how lucky those of us that live in America are.

In my opinion, GetAbstract is hands down the best quality executive summary service.  They produce 50 new summaries of the best business books each month, and have over 6000 summaries in their library.

We have since entered into an affiliate relationship with GetAbstract and are in the process of adding a banner to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog.  Currently, they are 1 of only 3 businesses we recommend.  Infusionsoft and Web Video University being the other 2.

Free Executive Summaries

You can acquire 2 complimentary executive summaries from GetAbstract by visiting their homepage.

I also negotiated to be able to offer you a three summary packet to help you quantify the value proposition of their service.

In addition, I handpicked 3 of their best summaries!  The summaries are entitled:

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High;
• Email Marketing by the Numbers;
• and The Customer Rules.

You can download them here.

I hope this post contributes to you building a system that will help you learn more in less time.  If you have a strategy for learning more in less time, please feel free to share it in the comment section below.  Also, I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this post; if you have a question, you can leave it in the comment section below as well.

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Here is a short video I recorded to explain the big picture:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So that was the quick summary. Now I am going to go over some of the more finite details so you can quickly add the value of this service to your business.  It all starts w/ choosing how you want to leverage your TimeDriver calendar link.  In the video above, I explained the way our customer support team uses their TimeDriver calendar links; they put the link in their email signature.  Now that’s all fine and dandy for them, but not for me.  I need to limit the access people have to me and screen the people that want access to ensure I am the best person to assist them.  Because of that, I only include my calendar link when I wish to schedule an appointment w/ someone.  You could leverage TimeDriver in one of both of the ways previously mentioned.  Also, you have the option to put your TimeDriver calendar link anywhere you can place a hyperlink: eBooks, Websites, etc…  A couple of words of caution: 1) our web meeting volume increased 4 fold overnight. Make sure you are prepared to handle the load; and 2) If you do start placing your calendar link all over the internet, I suggest you setup a redirect to it from your primary domain that way if you stop using TimeDriver, or simply want to use a new Calendar, you can easily redirect the traffic to your new TimeDriver URL.

This is what your prospects and/or customers will see after they click your TimeDriver link:

Here is Step 2

And this is Step 3

Pretty self-explanatory, right?  When configuring your TimeDriver calendar, you can also choose to create a Welcome Screen that will be shown prior to Step 1 w/ a picture and text.  You can also tweak your availability in a few different ways: only show “x” Timeslots available per day, disallow day of bookings, and more….

I hope you found this post informative.  My goal is to help you find, understand, and leverage the tools you need to automate your business and liberate yourself from the daily grind.  I am very open to answering any questions you may have about TimeDriver, all you need to do is leave your question in the comments sections below.  I would also really appreciate it, if you would let me know your thoughts about the quality and usefulness of this post and tool.  If you start to use TimeDriver and it helps you, please also let me know.  I am here to serve you; the more information I have, the better I can assist you.

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You can buy a 24 inch monitor for a couple of hundred bucks.  If you are working off anything smaller than 22 inches, you are wasting time!

A study done by the University of Utah indicates that you would save around 2.7 hours per day when using a 24 inch widescreen monitor in comparison to a 18 inch standard monitor.

My laptop has a 14.1 inch widescreen display!  I upgraded to a 24 inch external display.  I don’t run dual-screens, quite frankly it confuses me.  I have been using my external display for around 3 months now.  The additional freedom provided by the vastly greater work area allows me to open more windows and switch between them easily.  I normal have around 30 browser windows open, along with several other programs.  On my 14 inch screen I can have 7 tabs open in Firefox per browser window.  When using my external display, I can have 19 tabs per window.  This is especially useful when I am doing research for articles and interpreting our monthly reporting (e.g. spreadsheets).

I like my external display so much that I think I am going to take it with me, when I go on my next holiday; smuggling it in the boot of my car [they won't find out until it's too late; hehehe!].

Lastly, the Utah study indicates that increases in productivity start to decrease, when you go above a 26 inch widescreen display.

Closing Thoughts

I would hazard a guess that once you acclimatize to a large display, you will be able to incrementally increase the size of your monitor and your productivity would increases.  This is because the eye limit has not yet be reached.  I believe that as the peripherals we use to interact with our computer change and improve – and as the actual interface starts to morph – we will be able to make huge leaps in productivity by using massive monitors or total immersion virtual displays.

Do you use a large monitor; do you feel it has improved your productivity?  Are you using a small monitor and possibly have questions about upgrading?  Also, this is the first blog post I have published using footnotes; do you have any suggestions or comments about them?

Don’t know which monitor to buy?  The ASUS VH242H 23.6-Inch Widescreen LCD is very good and costs only $200.  I got one for our office through Amazon.com, but you can buy it from NewEgg.com, PriceGrabber.com, and most other sites.

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No related posts.

This post outlines the service and tools I use and how they interoperate with each other.  By recording this information, I gain the ability to streamline my activities.  Each service and tool becomes part of a flow of activities.

Once you can see your activities as a flow, you can analyze them in relation to your ultimate goal.

The goal of this post is to address how I do it [not why I do it, though I will address why to some degree].  If I get enough comments indicating that you would like me to elaborate on the why, I will gladly go into more detail in a subsequent post.

Blogging is the fulcrum of my daily activities, a prerequisite of which is learning and testing.  One of the main reasons I blog is to help our members grow their businesses.  I also really enjoy the process of learning and testing.  I don’t fancy myself as much of a teacher, but I am a learner and a tester, lol.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I just published articles to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog [the blog you are reading now].  I have since made the realization that some of the content I produce doesn’t belong in this blog.  So, I launched two additional blogs: 1) FollowFlywheel.com as my business notebook/journal; and 2) FollowFranco.com as my personal notebook/journal.  This way, people have the choice to tune into the channels that interest them.

I publish mainly business and marketing related articles to this blog.  While FollowFlywheel is my notebook/journal, I also use it as a sort of chronicle.  FollowFranco is purely for personal things and has an emphasis on my studies into quantum theory as it relates to human potential.  Putting all of these topics into one blog would most likely lead to traffic dilution due to a lack of focus–the noise/signal ratio would be high for those people who want to tune into just one channel, or even a sub-topic within a channel.

This blog runs on WordPress.org.  This allows us to fully-customize the appearance and gives us access to tons of plug-ins and widgets.  FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco on the other hand run on Posterous which is superb if you need a quick and easy way to publish content to the web.  You can publish text, audio, and video by simply sending an email to a Posterous Blog.  This makes for uber-fast publishing.  Posterous also allows me to auto-post my blog posts to several other services as well.  This is very handy!

Here are some notes on how I use my Posterous Blogs and how my auto-posting is setup:

FollowFlywheel

A business orientated notebook.  Anything noteworthy gets published to this blog, for example: spur of the moment thoughts, business related purchases, what I am reading, where I am going, interviews, any tools I find, and more….

• Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
• Write a blurb in FollowFranco for very occasional for noteworthy posts.

My FollowFlywheel Posterous Blog auto-posts to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook Wall
3. LinkedIn
4. FriendFeed [lifestream]

Blog Commenting

1. Disqus
   1. Makes an update w/ a link back to the post on:
      1. Twitter
      2. Facebook Wall
      3. Yahoo Profile
2. Non-Disqus, setup a profile, or comment and then paste comment into FollowFlywheel blog w/ a link

Twitter

1. Seesmic App for G1
   1. To run more than one Twitter account from a single app, you need to upgrade to the pro version.  So, I use two different apps (see FollowFranco below).

1. Save stuff to read w/ ReaditLater
2. Firefox Toolbar for Quick Links Only (e.g. Infusionsoft Login, jiveSYSTEMS Blog Admin, Twitter Login)
3. Delicious is my primary bookmark archive, I then add and annotate the best resources and references into my Diigo account
4. Digg noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post
5. StumbleUpon noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post

Other FollowFlywheel Items

1. Video
   1. Vimeo
   2. YouTube
2. Lifestreams
   1. FriendFeed
   2. Profilactic
   3. Lifestream.fm
   4. BackType
   5. MyBlogLog
3. Ping.fm sends status updates to:
   1. Twitter
   2. Facebook Wall
   3. Flickr
   4. LinkedIn
   5. Friendfeed

FollowFranco

A place where friends and clients alike can get to know me on a more personal level.  I also publish things about quantum theory as it relates to human potential to this blog.

• Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
• Write a blurb in FollowFlywheel very occasionally for noteworthy posts, mainly human potential focused ones.
• Remove the double post because Twitter and Posterous auto-post to my Facebook Wall.

My FollowFranco auto-posts to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook Wall
3. FriendFeed [lifestream]

Twitter

1. Posts to Facebook Wall
2. Twitdriod App from G1

FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco

Each have their own unique accounts.  For example, I have a FollowFlywheel Twitter account and a FollowFranco Twitter account.  I keep the channels completely separate.  This starts with creating unique emails addresses.  I then use an email filter to segment the inbound emails accordingly.  In this manner, I prioritize and batch my inbound email activities.

Lifestreams

A lifestream is a comprehensive record of one’s daily activities.  They pull data from many services into one big stream of information.  You will note from above that I only use a FriendFeed account for FollowFranco.  [For FollowFlywheel, I use: FriendFeed, Profilactic, and Lifestream.fm]

Blog Commenting

I mainly use Disqus.  It has two components; a plug-in to manage comments on blogs for publishers, and a profile for commenters.  If you would like to learn more about Disqus, after reading the rest of this article, I suggest you take a gander at this post We Migrated from IntenseDebate to Disqus for Blog Comments.  Whenever I comment on a blog with Disqus comments, it auto-publishes my comment to my Disqus profile, Facebook Wall, and Twitter account.

I also have a BackType profile.  It’s aggregates all my comments on blogs into one stream by using my social accounts and both the URL/Website field.

Central Profile

To further connect everything together, I created a central profile WillFranco.com.  I use this link as my website URL whenever I sign-up for a new service, for example, my Twitter accounts link to WillFranco.com.  This makes it easy for people to understand my value proposition and potentially select one, or more, of my blogs to read.

Online Storage

Dropbox is the winner, hands down. My goal is to centralize and streamline. Unlike almost every other online hard-drive service out there, Dropbox is super simple.  It works just like a regular hard-drive and shows up like one on your computer as well.  Any files you place in your Dropbox hard-drive store locally, sync across all of your computers, and are stored online as well.  Dropbox works seamlessly and silently to accomplish both backup and storage. 

SEO Monitoring

I found ExactFactor several month ago.  I signed up for a free account, and I typed in our URL and the keywords I wanted to track.  Now, I get an email letting me know our position for each of the keywords I am tracking, each week.

RSS Feed Subscriptions

Google Reader does me well.  I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds and Google Reader makes them easy to manage, annotate, and even share.  Subscribing to RSS feeds and then reading them all in Google Reader is the easiest way I have found to stay in-tune with the blogs I follow.  Just recently, as in, while writing this post, I added a Firefox plug-in called AidRSS which helps me sift through the many feeds I subscribe to by assigning each post a rank.

When I want to see what is going on in the news, I use Google’s FastFlip.  It’s a super cool Google Labs project that does exactly what the name implies, allows you to flip really fast through the headlines of major newspapers.

Closing Thoughts

I use many other tools and services.  For the purposes of this post, I have stuck the ones I use the most frequently.

Notable items that I did not mention in the post include my jiveSYSTEMS account which I use to send video emails to people, and Infusionsoft–the CRM software we use to manage our company.  Since both are paid services, I did not mention them in the body of this post.

Also, I have been building a system to leverage video sharing sites for free publicity, the backbone of which is TubeMogul, a video syndication service–you upload a video to TubeMogul and it distributes it to your chosen video sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and more…).  I didn’t address video sharing in this post because I haven’t thoroughly road tested it yet.

I hope you found this post useful.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions please leave them below.

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Back in May, I also noticed a couple of other companies that had developed blog commenting plug-ins. Disqus being one of them. Needless to say, they have taken the blogosphere by storm and have expanded past a commenting plug-in and into a blog commenting community. Every time you leave a comment on a blog, it gets added to your Disqus profile. People can track your comments by following your profile, just like Twitter. In addition, when you comment on blogs with Disqus installed, you can automatically post a link to your comment on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more….

I did a quick video interview with Ro Gupta, VP of Business Development at Disqus to explain more. We were also giving WeToku a test-drive, it’s a free service for recording video interviews online; the system is still in early beta, so the quality of the audio and video isn’t all that good, I hope that doesn’t detract too much from the quality of the content. Our goal was to give you a 10 minute explanation on how Disqus can benefit bloggers and commenters.

Here is a screenshot of my Disqus Profile:

You can see how the Disqus Commenets plug-in works, at the bottom of this post.  If you don’t have a blog, click the Disqus logo below and create a Disqus Profile.  Whenever you comment on this blog, or another blog that has Disqus Comments, your comments will be centralized to your Disqus Profile.  If you have a blog and want to install or migrate to Disqus, visit their website.

Do you have a question about Disqus?  Just leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer it.

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Here is a visual just in case you are not familiar with these plugins:

Our readership has increased significantly since adding them. They are easy to install and require no coding. They are also a superior indicator for identifying your best posts. Hits and comments cannot compete with the metric of how many times a post has been tweeted and shared on Facebook by your readers.

One of our primary goals as bloggers is to write about things people want to read and ultimately talk about. This is the key to creating exponential growth in your readership and sustaining it to the saturation point.  When use the metrics hits, comments, and shares you have a very powerful recipe for building an online community.

Here are the direct links to the plugins I mentioned:

• TweetMeMe
• Facebook Share

I hope you find this information useful. If you have any thoughts to share about these plugins, please use the comments section below.

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Here are the steps you would take to NoFollow links that have no value in a WordPress Blog: 1) login to the back of WordPress; 2) open a current post with the outbound links you wish to NoFollow; 3) then click on the HTML tab; and 4) nofollow the appropriate outbound links.

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We try to live by this mantra every day; working smarter, not harder.  Some tasks can be automated using technology, such as a CRM.  Other tasks can be delegated to members of the team.  When neither of these is an option, you have a choice to make.  If a task is important, you do it; if it’s not, you ditch it.  In this way, we’re able to maximize the efficiency of our team and get more done with less effort.  This philosophy applies to all aspects of our operations, including the management of our social media presence.

If you’ve read a lot about Twitter, you’ve probably found that a lot of people are trying to figure out exactly how to use this medium.  The goal is to connect with customers and prospects, and to monetize this effort.  After a lot of research and a lot of time spent testing various theories, we’ve come up with a solution: Use Twitter to find people who have the potential to become prospects.

3 Steps to Better Leverage Twitter

1. Define Indicators – What traits do your ideal customers have?  For us, one of these traits might be a person who owns a small business and maintains a web presence for this business or someone who uses a CRM.  When you think indicators, think keywords!

2. Search for Prospects- Once you know what you’re looking for, you can search for people with the right indicators through Twitter.  For this example, I would search “small business” or “CRM.”

3. Think Automate— After a few minutes of searching and finding only people who have Tweeted your keywords, you may become frustrated.  I know we did!  Now you have a choice to make.  You don’t want to do it yourself since it takes too long, but it’s too important to ditch.  You can either delegate it or ditch it.  You probably won’t want to delegate it either, since this process doesn’t yield high-quality results and will drain your resources, so you automate it!

Now that you’ve decided to automate finding followers, how can you do this?

We’ve used a lot of tools to manage our Twitter accounts, and of those tools TweetAdder is the best one we’ve found so far.  I signed up for the free trial and quickly came to realize that this was the answer I was looking for.  TweetAdder allows us to automate the process of using Twitter; freeing us to focus on connecting with our fellow Tweeters.  Instead of spending my days searching for like-minded people, I can tell TweetAdder exactly what I’m looking for and it will do the rest.

Above is a picture of TweetAdder, let’s break down its capabilities, tab by tab:

Login—I can manage up to 5 accounts with the license I bought, and depending on your needs, you can manage as many or as few as you like.

Search—This is the core function I was looking for.  TweetAdder lets you search for your indicators, or keywords, just like your Twitter account does, but better.  You can search for users by location, who they follow, who follows them, and my personal favorite, their profile information.  Going back to my earlier example, I can find people who have the word “CRM” in their profile info.  Chances are, if you have “CRM” in you profile, you use one.  The results of this search are much more relevant than using Twitter alone.

Follow—Now that you’ve found these highly-relevant Tweeters, you can follow them.  TweetAdder lets you automate this function as well.    By doing so you can learn more about what they do and what’s important to them (free market research!!).  Many of these people become followers!

UnFollow—As you might of guessed, TweetAdder lets you automate the process of unfollowing users as well.  You can set limits on the number of people to unfollow, who to unfollow, and when.

Messages—You can automate your direct messages as well.  Instead of having to write a message to each person, or manually sending a prewritten message, you can have them sent automatically.  TweetAdder gives you control over how many messages you send, to whom, and integrates with bit.ly so you can shorten links.

Tweets—Do you Tweet often?  This feature allows you to finish all your Tweeting at once.  You can write 10 Tweets, and control when they are posted.

Replies—When someone Tweets about you, you can reply automatically with pre-authored responses.

Automation—This is where the magic happens.  Using this tab, you can pick and choose which functions to automate, based on the settings you have selected on the other tabs.  You can also decide when these automated tasks take place.

Misc— This tab isn’t very useful.  Suffice it to say that you can delete the direct messages you receive that contain links.

In Summary

1. You can better leverage Twitter by searching for people who have the potential to become prospects.
2. This process can be automated with a variety of tools; we use TweetAdder.
3. This will save you time and expose your message to a large number of Tweeters.

Please let us know if you found this article to be helpful, and if you would like to see more articles about tools you can use to put the human touch in your marketing.

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Side note: I am a huge advocate of Google’s services. I use Gmail, Gdocs, Gcal, Reader, G1 phone, Analytics, Talk, Feedburner, Alerts, and Maps. I am also on the waiting list for Voice and Wave. These services are free and web-based. I shaved almost 2 hours off my work day by migrating from Outlook into Gmail. Folder structures always felt inefficient to me, and then I found Gmail’s archiving systems. It took me a couple of weeks to adjust to archiving emails. However, once you get used to relying on Google’s search algorithm to find things, the desire to create those annoying folders and sub-folders goes away. Think about it for a second, a prerequisite to finding something is remembering a characteristic about it. Type that info into the top of Gmail and in less than a second you will be presented with the information you need.

Here is a short video overview of Google Voice:

Get an invite to Google Voice.

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If you work online, you need to watch the video below, then go to the Google Wave page to be notified when it is released.

Here is a link to Google Wave.

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Here is the Problem

Networking has become more like one of those speed dating television shows. It’s fast paced and often hard to build rapport. Following up with people can be just as hard due to the email-haze after a big network meeting. Plus, I haven’t even mentioned entering the business cards into your database, and classifying them; even if you have a business card scanner, this process alone can take hours!

This is My Solution

Using any CRM system [I use Infusionsoft] you can create a web form and run predetermined automated actions off of it when you enter someone’s contact information. I have created two web forms specifically for networking. When I enter someone’s contact information into my database, it processes a pre-authored email template to that person—a generic email that looks and feels personalized. The web form also tags their contact record with ‘network lead.’ This allows me to figure out my conversion rate for people I meet at network meetings, and thus my ROI. One more automated action takes place: I also add them into an automated follow-up sequence, which is basically a series of time delayed pre-authored emails. Each email includes a link to an evergreen video. This is the game changer! By relying on the merge fields in the email templates [that automatically insert information in their contact record] to personalize the email itself, I can keep the video generic,

“Hi it was nice meet you. I recorded this short video to reintroduce myself, as I am sure you – like me – meet a lot of people at these network meetings. Anyways, with little more than an inexpensive webcam and this nifty piece of software called jiveSYSTEMS, I am able to record videos like this one in a matter of minutes. It took me only 4 to make this one. Oh one more thing, I might send you a few more emails with videos in them over the next few weeks to touch base. If you don’t want to receive them, you can simply hit the unsubscribe button, found in the email within you inbox. I am looking forward to talking with you further about our mutual business and objectives. Have a great day!”

What kind of reaction do you think I get?

Conclusion

Whether you are using a CRM system combined with our Video Email and Web Video Marketing System, or just using our system alone, you can increase your response rate from network meetings a great deal using this strategy, and save a lot of time in the process. I guarantee that putting the human element back into your marketing using video email and web video will have an immediate and positive effect of your business. Your Return on Investment (ROI) will be mind boggling!

Give it a go, take a 30 day test-drive of our video email and web video marketing system.

• [webinar] Concept to Profit 2.5 – Learn How to Produce and Distribute Video Content Online
• My Top 24 Tools for Success
• 3 Simple Steps to Make Money Marketing with Video Email
• 7 Secrets to Success with Web Video
• Liberate Yourself from the Daily Grind

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How to use WebsiteGrader
Using WebsiteGrader is simple. You type in your homepage URL and hit the “Generate Report” button. Within a few short minutes, you will be given a report that rates your website across several important factors. The report has informative summary headings to help you understand the data.

One of the ways their tool has helped me
At present, the jiveSYSTEMS homepages scores 96.5/100. We scored pretty highly from the start, but just a couple of weeks ago when we migrated servers; our 301 from non-www to www went down. If I didn’t check our website post-migration, it could have taken us a few days or more to realize that our 301 redirect stopped working [for no apparent reason]. A 301 redirect is used to move one URL to another URL permanently. The search engines do not penalize 301 redirects in the same way they do other types of redirects.

Even if you are not a coder WebsiteGrader is useful
Most likely, you (like me) are not a professional coder. Setting up a 301 in the .htaccess file is definitely a job for your webmaster. However, the knowledge is extremely useful. Here is why: when our 301 redirect from non-www to www went down, all the backlinks pointing to jivesystems.com (different than www.jivesystems.com, at least from a search algorithm point of view) were not giving us SEO credits. Our domain was literally split in two.

Additional insight
Don’t get caught up in getting your website a perfect score until you have a solid linkbuilding initiative in place. You can do this by hiring a SEO company that specializes in linkbuilding. You could also hire a few students to leave articulate comments on relevant blogs, or hiring a someone in-house.

Full Sail just launched several SEO/SEM and Social Media degree programs. If you give them a call, you might be able to snap-up an interm and/or higher a graduate student. Full Sail University has built a reputation as one of the premier media arts schools in the world. To the best of my knowledge, they were the first college to launch SEO/SEM and Social Media degrees.

The backbone of every SEO/SEM and Social Media campaign is content and backlinks.

Here is a link to Full Sail’s website, and another to the WebsiteGrader tool.

Afterword
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you find this information useful.  The only way I am going to know is if you leave a comment.  I am here to serve you.  My goal is to help you adjust to the evolving arena of marketing.  Please feel free to ask questions, leave praise , and also don’t hesitate to let me know how I can serve you better.  I am always looking to improve.  Just recently, I got an email from a client asking me to break things down into great detail.  Their insight was very helpful and I’m thankful for it.  This is because after reviewing some of my earlier posts, I realized I was taking my hours of study and practical application for granted.  Since my goal is to simplify and streamline your experience, I made the appropriate adjustments, and hopefully you like the results.

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Software

Infusionsoft – We use Infusionsoft to manage jiveSYSTEMS. It’s a CRM platform that focuses on highly targeted automated follow-up. All of our billing is automated and I can run revenue forecasts with a few click of the mouse. Automation is a huge part of doing business online. It is also critical to providing good customer service.

jiveSYSTEMS – We combine our jiveSYSTEMS (Video Email and Web Video Marketing System) with Infusionsoft. Turning many plain text emails into video emails. We also add videos to our squeeze pages and success pages to improve our conversion ratios.

Google Apps (free) – Don’t do business without it. I migrated from Microsoft Office. Wow. The difference is incredible. Outlook downloads all your emails locally [to your computer!]. This is bad news because it opens you up to a great deal more virus risk and slows you computer down as well. Whereas, Gmail [Google’s comparable product] is 100% web-based, just like Gdocs and Calendar. I also have the G1 phone, so I am free of the trials and tribulations of syncing my information.

GoToWebinar – If you want to market your business online, Webinars are a great way to do it. While GoToWebinar doesn’t support a video feeds like WebEx, it’s a great deal less expensive. We can host Webinars with up to 1000 attendees for $99 per month. That’s a great deal! Besides, the last time I checked, the video feeds in presenting software needed a lot of work.

Crossloop (free) – GoToWebinar isn’t right for every situation. That’s why I use Crossloop. You can setup a 1-on-1 screensharing very quickly. The only caveat is that both people need to have a Crossloop account and the software installed which takes a few minutes.

Jing (free) – This nifty piece of software lets you take still images of anything you see on your screen. You can also record short videos. My Jing is setup to connect to our jiveSYSTEMS domain.

Camtasia – The paid version of Jing focused on screen-recording.

SnagIt – The paid version of Jing focused on capturing stills of your screen. It also offers a limited set of recording features.

Mindjet MindManger – Mindmapping is one of the most efficient ways I have found to collect and categorize ideas. If you don’t know how to Mindmap, I suggest you learn sooner rather than later.

CCleaner (free) – This is the best program I have found to clean-up my computer. It clears out cookies and tidies up my registry. I don’t really know how it works, I just know it does and does so flawlessly.

AVGFree (free) – Virus software slows down your computer. I dislike slow computers. I advise my clients to buy very powerful computers because they greatly enhance the speed at which you can work.

Adobe Master Collection – This suite is a little on the expensive side but well worth the investment in the long run. I had our graphics team teach me to do basic graphics work for the blog post images. Our videographer also taught me how to edit videos. Granted I am no expert, but when I am in a bind, I know I can get the job done.

Mozilla Firefox (free) – I have almost every browser installed on my computer (IE, Firefox, Flock, Opera, Safari, Avant, and Chrome). I use Firefox almost all the time. It’s super fast. You can tweak Firefox, adding multiple plugins to help streamline your workflow.  Lastly, it’s reliable.  When it does occasionally crash, it almost always recovers the last pages you were viewing.

Dropbox – Sync files across multiple computers. I store all my files in Dropbox, and as a team we have created jiveSYSTEMS folders. Anything we place in these folders instantly appears on our collaborator’s computers. The changes are automatically synced as well. The result, I get the comfort that I can throw my computer at the wall, go get another one off the shelf, and be back up and running in no time at all.

Hardware

Lenovo Laptop – I was a stalwart Sony fan. I bought one of the first VAIO’s when I lived back in England. And then… I had a bad experience with their customer support after buying a new laptop. I did some research and decide to purchase Lenovo. I am now a raving fan of Lenovo’s Thinkpad line. They don’t build laptops, they build battleships that are tough as nails and quiet, very quiet.

24inch External Monitor – I never would have thought a big screen would make such a big difference to my efficiency. Working off two screens is great for copywriting and reviewing statistics.  If you like to multitask, having two screens facilitates juggling a lot more tasks.

G1 Mobile Phone – This puppy has changed my life! I held out on buying a PDA for years and finally gave in late last year. I thought I would become an addict. In fact, the result is quite the opposite. I don’t get bogged down because I can breeze through my emails while waiting at the Chiropractor, in line at the supermarket, etc…

Mobile Broadband Internet – Don’t leave home without it. Some coffee shops charge, some don’t, other have a really slow connection. For around $50 per month it’s worth not having to worry about it.

External Mouse – Being the utilitarian that I am. I swore blind that my laptop mouse was sufficient. Thankfully, I have some great friends who got me an external mouse. While I don’t use it all the time, when I am doing research and review statistics, it makes a huge difference. Switching between the mouse pad and external mouse also reduces the strain on my wrist. My laptop supports Bluetooth, so I don’t have to plugin a USB cable or USB transmitting device. If yours does, it’s worth the few extra bucks to get a Bluetooth mouse.

Logitech 9000 Webcam – Communicating with video is a reality. This web cam costs around $80. It puts out an amazing quality picture and crystal clear audio. The audio is good enough for podcasts [if you have a quite computer].

Flip Video Portable Camcorder – You never know when inspiration is going to hit you. The Flip is around $100 and is well worth the investment for that exact reason alone. The Flip is great for doing video interviews with promotional partners. It’s also great for spicing up you videos with some different scenery.

Sony HDR-SR11 HD Camcorder – Now an HD camcorder isn’t for everyone, but they are really useful, if you know how to edit, have editing software, and lights. In my opinion, you also need to know how to produce videos without a script. I use a simple bullet point outline for my videos. Some people use a teleprompter and script, but it adds so much unnecessary production time. I am not in Hollywood and I am not competing with the Fortune 500 companies [not yet]. I have yet to set the camera to HD mode. It’s totally pointless at the moment and adds way too much time to editing and exporting. I am producing videos for the web. SD mode is more than adequate for this task.

Video Lighting (Florescent Softboxes) – The Sony Camcorder is digital so is the Flip. Digital camcorders produce grainy footage in low-light situations. You can get by just fine without using lights when using The Flip, opting to record in good lighting situations. When using the Sony Camcorder though, you need lights. They make a huge difference to the quality of your video footage.

Whiteboard – I think visually. I spend a large part of my day [and sometimes nights] running flows with the team on my huge whiteboard. If the store stocked a bigger one I would buy it. My advice to you, buy the biggest whiteboard you can fit on your wall and mindmap on it often.  There are a number of websites where you can buy them, just Google “whiteboard.”

So there you have it.  You know the primary tools I use for business.  All of them are indispensable.  Some you can run with immediately, others take some time.  But you can learn how to use them all.  With a little work, you’ll using all of these tools with the best of them.

• My Networking Strategy – It Works!
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• 7 Secrets to Success with Web Video
• Liberate Yourself from the Daily Grind

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Learn more about Giovanni, a social media expert at Gallucci.net

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