We always try to challenge our artistic abilities and produce some interesting and creative artwork. That is why we decided to create some wallpapers for the month of May, 2011 with hopes that they are a bit more distinctive than the rest of the stuff you find here. We have decided to offer these wallpapers free of charge.

It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please make a note that:

You can preview the wallpapers by clicking the images and then right click to set them as your desktop wallpaper. Enjoy!

Spring Flowers Calendar 2560×1600

May Galaxy Calendar 1600×900

Blossom Calendar 2560×1600

Fantasy Calendar 1920×1200

Minimal May Calendar 1600×1200

My blog token for Technorati is B9EMVW5HVS7P. Please ignore this number as it is only listed here in order to get index myself with www.defactomind. Please read on.

With over 250 million blogs indexed by Technorati is hard to ignore such a powerhouse if you want to promote your blog. The process is easy and joining it’s free.

Before we start please make sure that you have an RSS Feed for your blog. You can find it here: http://feedburner.google.com. In order for this to work you should also have a Gmail account. The article “Subscribe via Email to Feeds in 5 Easy Steps” will explain how to do this.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Go to www.technorati.com and click the “Join” link.

Step 2: Next, you need to claim your blog by clicking on the button called “Claim”. Pretty straight forward, huh?

Step 3: Just fill in all the required information and don’t forget the URL for your own blog. You do this in the box at the bottom of the page where your “Profile” is. The box is under the heading ‘My claimed blogs’. Once you are done, just click “Claim”.

Step 4: Fill in all the relevant tags related to your blog in the box provided.

Step 5: You will also be required to fill in your RSS Feed URL. Refer to the Notes before these steps.

Step 6: Now you wait until you receive an email from Technorati with your token. Sometimes it’s minutes but sometimes it could take days. The email will say:
“Thank you for submitting your blog claim on Technorati. Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the site [your site URL will be here] by looking for a unique code. We have just assigned the claim token [your number will be here] to this claim. Please visit http://technorati.com/account/ for more details, including how to use the claim token.”

The number inserted in the beginning of this post is my “Claim Token”. It has to be in a post to prove that I am the author of the blog.
In order to post your token you can create a simple post with the title as “Token post for Technorati – Please ignore” or something of that effect and within the post copy & paste your claim token number.

Step 7: After your post is live, you need to visit http://technorati.com. Sign in and click on the ”Check Claim” button at the bottom of your account page.

Step 8: You will be asked if you have already made a temporary post – and you have – so confirm by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

Step 9: You will then receive an email confirming that Technorati has successfully indexed your blog and found your pesky “Claim Token”.
Once accepted, you can view your blog listing on Technorati. This listing will help others find your blog much easier.

Law 1:

Become the expert in your niche market (or persuade the audience to perceive you as the expert)

Law 2:

Make as many friends as possible (on and off line)

Law 3:

Communicate directly, clearly and to the point.

Law 4:

Reputation – Get, guard it and maintain it like your life depends on it. It actually does.

Law 5:

Be bold. Be colorful. Stand out. Do whatever you can to not be lame but be polite.

Law 6:

Invite everyone to participate in everything you do. Well, almost everything…

Law 7:

Understand and master the concept of “Call to Action”. Bait people to come to you.

Law 8:

Show, don’t tell.Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Law 9:

Make your customers beg for more but don’t let them wait for too long.

Law 10:

Always present information based on customer’s point of view – WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)

Either I have ADD or a very short fuse because I have no patience waiting to load websites or applications off my computer. I always wanted to have a dashboard on my screen that would take me in a fraction of a second to all these resources. That day has come.

The following is a very sweet and short tutorial where you can setup your internet browser home page to your liking; where you can have all these applications just 1 click away instead of 3 or 4.

Here’s how my homepage looks like:

You can do this 2 ways:

• Quick & Dirty using Word (download template here)
• Using a program like Dreamweaver (if you are comfortable with coding web pages)

This article will describe the first method. Here are some preliminary steps, necessary before you actually construct the home page:

Preliminary Step 1: Make an inventory with all the logos of all the websites and applications you use the most. Make sure you crop them to a maximum of 200 x 200 pixels. That’s what mine are.
Preliminary Step 2: Create a folder on your computer and call it “Homepage”. This is where you will store the home webpage. Create another folder under this directory and call it “images”. Save all the image files of your favorite websites and applications under the “images” directory.

Now let’s delve into the meat of the matter:
Step 1: Open Word and Click ‘New”. Setup your margins to 1 all around (you might get a message saying that Word needs to have a very small margin even if you selected 0. That’s OK – just accept whatever Word wants). Setup the “Page Orientation” to “Landscape”.
Step 2: Insert a table with 5 columns and 4 rows. The top row will house the categories. I established “Business”, “Social Media”, “Email”, Resources” and “News”. Of course, yours might be different.
Step 3: Click inside Column1, Row 2 and insert your first image related to business. Let’s say it’s your login page of your blog or maybe your company’s website.
Step 4: Highlight the image and click “Insert / Hyperlink”. Fill in the information as seen below:

Step 5: Continue with all the other images. If you have an application or a specific file you want to create a link to just navigate through “Start / Computer” and find the file. Copy the path and then switch to your Word document and past it in the “Address” field for the “Hyperlink”.
Step 6: Once you finished save the file as a “Web Page” under the “Homepage” directory you created in the Preliminary Step 2 like so:

Call it “My Home Page” or whatever you want and presto! You got yourself a customized dashboard. All you have left is to actually tell your browser where to find that page. Read on to find out how to do it:
Step 7: Go back to the “Computer” and find the path to the file you just created. Copy the path, switch to your web browser.
Step 8: Click on “Settings” and then “Internet Options”. Under the “General” tab the first field is “Home”. Past the path in that field and click “Apply” to save your new settings.

That’s it! If you don’t feel like going through the whole Word setup thing, just download the template here and feel free to modify it any way you want. Let me know how it goes and if I can help in any way; I am curious to see how your dashboards look like cause I’m loving mine.

If you would like to deliver your blog feeds using the “Subscribe via Email” feature, this article will show you how in 5 easy steps. I am assuming you already have a blog and produce articles on set schedule. In that case this feature will come really handy. Here are the steps:

Step 1:
Open your browser of choice and type in: feedburner.google.com. You should see the following screen:


If you already have a Gmail account login on the screen to the right. If you don’t click to claim your feed as the red arrow indicates.

Step 2:
Fill out the information about your blog in the screen displayed below:

Step 3:
Click on the name of the feed you just filled in as shown in the following screen:

Step 4:
On the new screen click on the tab called “Publicize” like so:

Step 5:
Look on the third row down on the left hand column and click on the link called “Email Subscriptions”. Notice on the right hand side column the code you need to insert into your blog in order to accept subscriptions to your feeds via email. Copy the code by highligting it and then right click to “Copy”:

Bonus Step 6:
Login into your blog with adminitrator rights and decde where you want to insert the text. I use the Text widgets on the right sidebar of my blog for this feature. Of course if you know a bit of coding you can modify the look of this any way you want it, like so:

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial who was inspired by numerous questions I found on the web from frustrated bloggers who couldn’t figure out how to do this.

As a side note – this feature was tested in WordPress and worked just fine. In case you encounter any type of errors (Feedburner Error 502/503) there is an easy fix as presented in the following awesome article: “How to Fix Feedburner Error 502 & 503 After moving Feed from Feedburner to Google“

As a business owner you should encourage all your staff to engage in promoting your products and services on Social Media.

This activity should be daily and performed religiously. These activities should be separated on the type of platform they are using, thusly:

COMMUNICATION PLATFORMS

Blogging (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday):

The company promoters will have to report at the end of each day on all the activities performed and closely monitor spikes in traffic within Google Webmaster Tools. These activities will include making comments on all the blogging websites and/or include your company’s website. Here’s a list of such websites:

• Blogger.com
• Livejournal.com
• OpenDiary.com
• TypePad.com
• ExpressionEngine.com
• Technorati.com
• Blogged.com
• BlogCatalog.com
• Blogarama.com
• PitchEngine.com
• BlogSearchEngine.com
• DMoz.org
• IdeeaMarketers.com
• Ezinearticles.com
• GoArticles.com
• OneMinuteU.com
• ArticlesBase.com
• Authorsden.com

Micro-blogging (every 30 minutes):

Company promoters and professional staff will have access to TweetDeck and continue on promoting the company throughout the day. The following will be used:

• Twitter.com
• Plurk.com
• Tumlbr.com
• Jaiku.com

Social-Networking (every 2 hours):

Every employee will be encouraged to make as many friends possible without affecting the overall performance during the day. The following platforms will be visited every day, after lunch for no more than 30 minutes daily. The marketing promoters will continue to engage others on these platforms throughout the day.

• Bebo.com
• Facebook.com
• LinkedIn.com
• MySpace.com
• Skyrock.com
• Hi5.com
• Ning.com

Social network Aggregation

The company staff will have HootSuite installed on each computer and perform these small marketing tasks on a daily basis.

• FrindFeed.com
• HootSuite.com
• Twitterbadges.com
• Twitterfeed.com

COLLABORATION PLATFORMS

Wikis (update 1 per month):The company marketing staff will be in charge of composing these wikis only after gaining approval.

• Wikipedia.org
• PBWorks.com
• WetPaint.com

Social tagging (Daily):

• Delicious.com
• StumbleUpon.com
• Stumpmedia.com
• CiteUlike.com

Social News (Daily):

• Digg.com
• Reddit.com
• Mixx.com

Opinion Sites(1 per week):

• Epinions.com
• Yelp.com
• MouthShut.com

MULTIMEDIA PLATFORMS

PhotoSharing (1 per week):

Company promoters will have access to a company digital camera and will take pictures that will later be uploaded on the following platforms:

• Flickr.com
• Photobucket.com
• SmugMug.com
• Picasa.com

Video (1 per month):

Company promoters will have access to 1 digital video camera and editing software to uopload professional made videos and create buzz on the following platforms.

• YouTube.com
• TubeMogul.com

Livecasting (1 every 3 months):

Podcasting will include interviews with bloggers and industry experts and will be distributed on the company website as well as the following platforms:

• Ustream.tv
• Justin.tv

Shocking, right? We all have programmed to think that whatever the client says – the client is always right. Right? Well…I am not that sure anymore. I start to feel a bit like Martin Luther. How about a project that should easily be completed in 3 weeks keeps on dragging for a long time. How does 4 years sound? Is the client still right or are you just plainly too nice (queue “stupid”, “sucker” and other self demeaning words) to accept the fact that the client is not Alpha & Omega?

Here are some pointers that can help you spot a client who can drag you down into the deeps of a perpetual “Ground Hog’s Day”:

• I want it all for nothing:
  If the client asks for everything under the sun, including the moon, the stars and their light and points out that he or she has a minuscule budget to deal with then run as fast and far as you can. Do not try to serve champagne to folks with beer money. They will drag you into a downward spiral of requests, amendments to the initial requests, changes, payment withholding and other “fun” stuff, not to mention the fact that the whole project will take forever.
• They know what they want but have no idea what they are asking for
  Stay away from those who do not have a plan. It’s funny how many times I hear:”I just need a website. Can you do it and how much does it cost?”. I usually just say: “Have a nice day”.
• A Signed Contract keeps you out of courts
  If everything goes well during the “discovery” process, make sure you put together a contract. Outline the communication procedure, dead-lines, payment schedule and sign off terms for each milestone. Most importantly have a signed copy dropped off with the client and keep the original in your designated folder for that client. You will return to it several times. If it’s more than 3 times, start discussing the transition of the project to someone else. Be nice about it but firm.
• Time is of the essence. Especially yours.
  If the project’s completion period did not include several birthday parties of your own, or your client’s for that matter, it’s time to fire the client. Of course, this is true only when the client is the one not sending you the information to complete the project even when you pointed it out at least 3 times. If the time drags on because of you, well – you are just lazy and you should be ashamed of yourself.

I am sure there are more – but for now, these should be sufficient to help you deal with some damaging clients and if I helped in any way through these bullet points, it would be nice to hear from you.

Most (if not all) small businesses are concerned with operating costs and cash flow, especially when they are in the start-up stages. In this article you will learn how you can handle business with less than $100 per month while all your business activities are humming at the right speed.

I chose to stay away from the obvious and instead give you the resources you might not have heard about, while others might be obvious but not quite known at this time. I have divided the must-have business activities in 3 major sections:

1. Communications
2. Sales
3. Finances

1. COMMUNICATION

This activity is vital to any business and without the right tools you might as well forget about starting anything, let alone a thriving new endeavor. Modern communication spawns across several fields:

• Telephone (voice mail)
• Messaging
• Faxing
• Online Meetings
• Email

With all the phone candy on the market most of these functions can be covered by any simple phone offered by a reliable network. Stick with Verizon or AT&T and you should have no problems with a 3 bar coverage signal in most of continental US.

In order to make yourself available to your clients, you are probably indicating your mobile phone as your primary business phone number. That’s fine and dandy but what happens if your client is outside your ‘realm” and need to speak with them on your “off-peak” hours? That $100 per month will look more like $1000 per month and the whole essence of this article would be lost.

That is why you need the all mighty Google again. Google, in case you didn’t know, is in phone business and if you are a small business, most of the stuff offered by them is FREE. Well, if it’s free – it’s for me!

Go to www.google.com/voice and check out the virtual number you can get and unify all your phone numbers into one. It’s a good read and will help you select the right central number you can now give away to your clients. Just don’t complain when they will be able to reach you from Hong Kong at 3:00 AM your time.

One thing a phone would not do is faxing; unless Steve Jobs is currently thinking of equipping the new iPhone with a thin roll of paper, this function is still bias to the existence of a fax machine or a PC/MAC on your desk.

There are however services that can eliminate the clunky fax machines off your desk and save some space for a cool new color printer, which can be connected to your computer and thus print any fax you might receive (and you really, really need to print it). Once such service is called Fax It Nice (www.faxitnice.com). The cool part about this service is the flexibility in plans and its simplicity as a program. You can virtually fax anything anywhere without really being at your computer because it does not require any software to download. Their pay as you go program puts the “nice” in the Fax It Nice.

Next runner up – eFax (www.efax.com). Still a good service and easy to understand software but a bit pricey compared to Fax it Nice. Give it a shot and see which one you like the best.

Online meetings

Yes – sometimes you really need these and if you want to appear as a well established business you better know how to handle this function. During these online sessions, you can share files, video, audio and even screen shots off your computer.

It’s a great tool to have access, especially if you have a lot of demos or portfolios you want to share with your audience. If that’s your need, head over to the nice people from Vyew (www.vyew.com) who offer this amazing tool for FREE.

Email

– there is one thing I need to add about this – you totally have to check out Google mail and I am not talking here about creating a Gmail account. That would look tacky to your clients, relying on free email accounts.

I am sure, by now you have considered and/or probably already purchased hosting for your website. Usually, that comes with free email accounts. Before you do anything, just migrate your domain to Google and get your personalized email on any computer or phone. [ Read this article to see how it is done ]. I use it and love it.

2. SALES

There is a sweeter alternative to carrying a Franklin planner with you to all the meetings – a CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) system that allows you to track your existing as well as perspective clients, meetings, dates, sales appointments, alarm you when some task or another is due, and the list goes on. You can have all this for around $24 per month by taking advantage of the services offered by 37 Signals on their website (www.highrisehq.com)

Similar types of software can be found at: Sugar CRM (www.sugarcrm.com) or Sales Force (www.salesforce.com).

3. FINANCES

You are probably keeping track of all your invoices, cash flow and bill payments using some sort of combination between and Excel Spreadsheet and QuickBooks. Well, the following is a nifty tool that gives you all that and more without breaking the piggy bank. I am referring to Less Accounting (www.lessaccounting.com) which could be your cup of tea is you are a business with small accounting needs. You will be amazed about its dashboard simplicity and easy reporting, so you know your financial situation at any time.
Others that come close to what Less Accounting can do are: Blink Sale (www.blinksale.com) and Fresh Books (www.freshbooks.com).

These are just some of the applications that are available on the web, so if you are using other ones and have great experience with them, please do share.

FREE Internet Marketing Tools; Blog directories, Domain Search, Keyword Analyzer and much more

Google AdWords
This Keyword Tool allows you to enter one keyword or phrase per line for each keyword suggestions. This will help you better target your online ads.

7Search.com
This Keyword Suggestion Tool allows you to enter keywords or keyword phrases in order to get additional keywords and keyword phrases suggestions.  You’ll also be able to see how many searches were done for the last month on this site for each keyword and phrase.

Keyword Finder Tool
This tool will show you Google & Yahoo suggestions on the same page. Just type in the keywords you are researching and you will get
many other keyword suggestions.

RSSTop55 – Top 55 Blogs and RSS Submission Sites
It is a great site if you have a blog and you want to get exposure for it. It lists over 100 places where you can register your blog.

Nameboy Domain Search
This is a pretty nifty website that will help you find the perfect domain name, even when you run out of ideas.

LunarPages
Great hosting company with competitive prices. You can also register your new domain name for free when you sign up for hosting.

JustHost
Another solid hosting company with unbeatable prices and a ton of features. Includes unlimited disk space and unlimited email accounts.

KeyWord Typo Generator
This script is designed to generate common typing mistakes for a list of keywords for use in AdWords, Overture and other Pay Per Click systems.

Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
This is a great website when you are looking for lists of related search terms based upon a term or keyword you enter related to your web site.

SEO Digger
The SEO Digger will allow you to research what keywords your site ranks high enough to be in the Google Top 20.

Compete.com
This wonderful tool will show you the traffic trends for competing websites, allowing you to compare sites side by side.

Search Engine Saturation
Search Engine Saturation helps you compare how many pages you have in the search indexes against your competitors’ sites.

Robots.txt Checker
This is a “validator” that analyzes the syntax of a robots.txt file to see if its format is valid as established by Robot Exclusion Standard
or if it contains any errors.

Keyword Suggestion Tool
This free tool will show top keyword phrases from Overture.

Link Harvester
Link Harverster allows you to deeply query the Yahoo database and gives a good amount of link details.

Density Analyzer
This tool will allow you to find common words and phrases on your site.

SEO Book
Good resource documentation about Free Search Engine Optimization Tools on SEO Book.

Website Spell Checker
One of the worst things you can do is publish a misspelled website. This site will help you identify those mistakes.

This real case is about the owner of the small business who, luckily, was in-tune with the ever changing technology and saw the opportunity to save money and increase productivity.

The owner, let’s call her Mary, managed a staff of 75 and was struggling with the following problems:

• It costs have gone up despite the recession
• Her company was using POP3 email and she was constantly juggling email between her iPhone, a laptop and her office desktop
• Sharing files between employees was a nightmare
• Calendar sharing was out of the question
• As the company grew, backups were a daily challenge and called for expensive upgrades

Mary contracted a local IT provider that had only one answer – Microsoft Exchange; a costly answer that required not only new hardware and software but also a boat load of extra hours for conversion, administration and training of the staff.

Mary contacted me and I offered a simple (almost free of charge) solution – Google Apps. Google – in their infinite wisdom (I mean that literally) presents an alternative to what the IT company suggested; an alternative that can be setup in minutes and solves all the problems listed above.

All you have to do is make some simple modifications to your domain and email setup. Here’s what Google Apps offers in terms of email:

Email, IM, voice and video chat

Each user gets 25 GB of email and IM storage (50 times the industry average).

Anytime, anywhere access to your email

Gmail is securely powered by the web, so you can be productive from your desk, on the road, at home and on your mobile phone, even when you’re offline.

Sync with Outlook & BlackBerry

Get the benefits of Apps on familiar platforms

Search and find emails instantly

Spend less time organizing email and find emails quickly with Google-powered search for your inbox.

Get less spam

Powerful Gmail spam filtering helps you stay focused on what’s important. Postini filtering lets you customize your spam protection. 

These are all free and very easy to setup. On top of all these, several other applications deserve to be mentioned, like:

• Google Calendar Agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar sync.
• Google Docs Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Work online without attachments.
• Google Groups User-created groups providing mailing lists, easy content sharing, searchable archives.
• Google Sites Secure, coding-free web pages for intranets and team managed sites.
• Google Video Private, secure, hosted video sharing.

How does Google do all this without charging? Well – there is a charge of $50 per user per year which for Mary amounted to about $3750 per year. This only in the event that 25GB of email is not sufficient for your users. Compare this and the cost of implementing what the IT company proposed and you’ll see the immediate benefits.

How is it possible that Google can do this? It’s gotta be some kind of conspiracy theory abut I cannot figure it out yet…When I do I’ll let you know. In the meantime, save yourself a bunch of money and a whole lotta of headaches with these awesome Google Apps and you won’t regret it. The link to this great time and money saver is: http://www.google.com/apps/

Cost Savings for Mary
She opted for the free version of the Google Apps and saved a little over $43,000 this year alone. Huge savings for a small company. Maybe she can give some bonuses to her hard working staff instead of throwing them away for unnecessary technologies.

I use Google Apps every day no matter what computer I use. In fact right now I am writing this from an Internet Café. In the Philippines! Via email. Totally secure, totally sweet…