So you’re an Outlook, MacMail, or Entourage user and you are struggling with how to deal with email at home or when you are out of the office traveling. Yes you might have webmail tied to your hosting platform but does it have spam and virus filtering built in?
What if your hosting providers server blows up? They all do at some point due to a spam attack or other act of god. What do you do for back up? Can you get mail elsewhere? Send mail?
The answer is state of the art, reliable, professional and free. It’s called Gmail (Google’s email). Set yourself up in 3 easy steps:
If you don’t have an account do your self a favor and head on over to gmail.com and sign up.
Then tell your webmaster to mirror all your email to your Gmail account. This means every piece of mail you receive will still end up in your Outlook AND a copy will be sent to your Gmail account.
When you go home or hit the road and don’t want to lug your laptop you can access your mail from your Gmail.com account
Professional ninja technique: set up your default ’send as’ as your main email address. So when you send an email from Gmail the recipient will see that it came from you@yourbusiness.com, NOT Gmail. You can do this under ‘Settings’ and ask your webmaster for help if needed.
So to wrap it up you can have your desktop Outlook to get all your email and have a webmail backup with spam an virus protection when you need it. In fact you might like Gmail so much you might just dump Outlook like I did :)
Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.
How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?
How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.
She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?
Well, the secret here is to go to “Google alerts.” Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.
It’s really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.
So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I’ll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.
Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don’t have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.
So, let’s create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here’s my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.
Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don’t. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, “the complete website” those three words need to be in order, “the complete website” for Google to actually post an alert.
Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word “the” the word “complete, ” and the word “website” randomly streamed throughout it. And that’s not helpful to me.
So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it’s interesting for me to read what’s going on in “Facebook” and “My Space”, and “You Tube” and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.
But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.
Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are saying about your business online.
Here’s the real problem. There is a lot to talk about in your business. You have new products, new services, you might have specials, seasonal promotions, holiday promotions, customer stories, case studies. Maybe you run a restaurant and you have menu items, or you host musical events and you want to get PR out the door. There are a lot of things happening in your business, and guess what, you should be getting it out on your website.
Now, what’s the problem here is most of us are locked out of our own websites. What I mean is that we have to go through our webmaster in order to get something changed on the website. And it’s just too much work, too much money, to get everything that’s going on in your business out the door on your website.
OK, what I just said is completely wrong today. Today the technology is available for you to be able to post information yourself easily; even easier than Microsoft Word is to use. You can log in today, with a user name and password right on your website, add the information you want to add, click “publish”, and bam, publish the information right on your website. And if you’re really clever you hook it up so that when you click “publish” it spits out to your email list as well as putting it on your website.
So, the software today has changed. The game is changing. In the past software such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage, NetObjects, and many others were used by webmasters, still are used by web masters, and they’re installed on the webmaster’s computer. That’s where all the work has to live.
There is also software that you can buy that you can run on your own machine that will hook up, through some work, with a software that either lives on the webmaster’s machine or through the server itself. But it’s fairly complex, mostly problematic in my experience. I’ve used a bunch of these different software packages and they just don’t work great.
The best software, here are the three biggies. I’m going to tell you which ones are the ones to look at. Drupal is a nice piece of software. It’s content management, it lets you make edits right online. Joomla!, same thing. Joomla! Makes edits right online. And you can even use WordPress to make edits online, logging in, no software required.
Now, here’s the downside. If you have a site that you recently built where you’re not quite ready to rebuild your website, it’s going to cost money for you to convert your current website into one of these websites that allow you to edit.
If you were thinking about rebuilding your site, or if you’re looking at a brand new website, then what I would do is I would talk to your webmaster about using one of these three software programs to build your website.
Now, there’s an additional benefit to publishing your information, things that are happening in your company, online. The benefit is that Google loves this stuff. If you start talking about the promotions you’re having and the press and the case studies that you’re doing, Google picks up on this and they’ll come back to your website more often, and more visitors will find your website. And that increases the chance that they’re going to connect with you.
So, here’s what to do.
Think about the types of things that change in your business, things that you want to talk about, products, services, specials. Do you promote things on the holidays? Do you have inventory? Do you have performers coming onsite? Are there events that you want to publish on your website and let the world know?
Make a list of the things in your business that you’d like to talk about. And that list should be online. It should be available and it should be changing over time. And you should have the ability to easily make those changes.
And then talk to your webmaster about getting your website converted into this new software that is making an enormous difference in the performance of websites.
Once you start adding information to your website you’re going to learn the power of your website, and how effective it can be for your business.
Oh and let me know if you have had any experience with Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or any other content management software!
