by Amber Miller | Aug 23, 2009 | Blog, Entrepreneur, Marketing
I shared with you last week how much Dave Crenshaw’s Book and free videos on time management have helped me tremendously. It is amazing how much more I can accomplish when I am NOT multitasking…what a concept!
I was blown away when Dave shared these statistics with me:
– Most people lose 28% or more of their work day to interruptions and the recovery time from interruptions
– Most people can only work 11 minutes until being interrupted
– Most people report being stressed out and too busy, IN SPITE OF the technology that was intended to give them more time
I wanted to let you know Dave is offering a FREE webinar this week and you can bet I’ll be on it! I am continually amazed at how much FREE and useful content Dave always gives away.
Check it out! I’ve already saved my seat!
by Amber Miller | Aug 21, 2009 | Blog, Marketing
I was asked this question yesterday during a weekly call with a client. She asked, “with all different url shorteners is there a particular one you recommend?”. Great question – here is how I responded.
While I’m not sure about all of the url shorteners available right now, I can share with you the ones I use on a daily basis.
In the past, I always used tinyurl.com. They were the “original url shortener” and came around in 2002. They were for a while, the most known and widely used. I personally do not use tinyurl anymore because some of the other shorteners have come out with some great additional features – such as shorter urls (the whole point of a tiny url is that it is tiny!) and at the time of this post, they do not currently have a way to track your links for you. Tinyurl.com does provide a 301 redirect which is good. With a 301 redirect it tells the search engine that the url you requested to shorten has “permanently” moved to the original url – giving credit to the original url – not the shortened url.
As far which shortener I use for he majority of my clients? Well that would bit.ly.com and snipurl.com. Both provide shorter characters in the urls created, offer tracking, support Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Twitterfeed and allow sharing.
I also prefer to use the custom options and actually give my shortened url a real name at the end – instead of allowing the program to create a random one for me. ie – www.bit.ly.com/amber compared to www.bit.ly.com/X23df. But that is just my preference. I think it looks nicer in emails 🙂
Is there another shortener that you just love? Share it with me here, I’d love to know!
To Your Delegating Success!
Amber Miller
by Amber Miller | Jul 25, 2009 | Blog, Entrepreneur, Ezines, Marketing
What to look for when choosing your hosting company? This will all depend of course upon your specific needs, but here is my revised short list of the things I look for when choosing a hosting company:
1) Customer support via telephone. Are you required to only use a help desk or email to get support? For me personally, I like to pick up the phone and talk to someone who can assist me.
2) CPanel – do they have CPanel or another user friendly control panel interface? This can be helpful especially for those who are not very technical.
3) Fantastico – or the ability to easily install wordpress and other ecommerce and blog applications.
4) Backups. Do they backup your server? If so, how often do they back it up, how long is the data retained by them and is there a fee for them to restore.
and newly added #5 – drumroll please….
5) Email distribution limitations…what are they? You may not have a large list now, but hopefully soon you will and then will your growth be at their mercy? (learned the hard way with this one :))
To Your Online Success!
Amber
by Amber Miller | Jul 24, 2009 | Blog, Entrepreneur, Marketing
While looking for a quick and easy online appointment scheduler for a client of mine, Elizabeth Marshall of AuthorTeleseminars.com, I remembered that another client, Sarah Robinson, aka The Maverick Mom, had told me about a cool online scheduler she found and wanted to try out, called Time Driver.
Elizabeth was looking for something that would allow us to actually set the time she was available – opposed to the times she was not available. Let me tell you, not too easy to do with some of the other online schedulers out there. Remembering Sarah’s suggestion a few months back, I decided to give Time Driver a try.
Wowzer! This system was a piece of cake!!! Love it. It allowed me to quickly and easily set up a specific group of times for Elizabeth that she is available for coaching – and then assigns a url for us to use in sending out to her clients for them to schedule. And, they offer a 90-day trial and does not require a credit card. Who does that anymore? Not 30 but 90 days…nice! And, get this. If you like it, after 90 days the cost is only $29.95 for an entire year!
The only thing I found a bit confusing at first was that Time Driver tries to be “smart” and uses the timezone that is set in your computer settings. So for me, as a VA, I wanted to set these times up for Elizabeth as Eastern, but I am in the pacific time zone. Once I figured out how it worked, I simply adjusted the times I entered to be pacific – and made a note to her clients that the times shown on the calendar were specific to those set up in their own computer system.
So far so good. I will continue to use it during the 90 day trial and continue to evaluate. If you use this, I would love to hear your comments and reviews!
To Your Online Success,
Amber
by Amber Miller | Jul 17, 2009 | Blog, Marketing
I’m in love…and it is with a wordpress theme! I have had a few opportunities to work with one of my terrific clients customizing a wordpress blog using the Thesis theme. All I can say is…this theme is amazing! The possibilities are endless.
The Thesis Theme has the most customizations I have seen in a wordpress theme. And what I love about it most – is that you can customize each site using the Thesis theme and not one of them will look the same…love that! I love that you can take a blog theme and make it look different than another blog that is using the Thesis theme.
Thesis also contains additional options that allow you to fine-tune each page of your blog site. The days of worrying about your SEO are over!
I have already suggested 2 of my other fabulous clients make the switch 🙂
Happy Friday!
Amber Miller
The Delegation Diva
by Amber Miller | Jun 26, 2009 | Blog, Marketing
Aweber announced yesterday that you have the option to have more CONTROL over the days/times your autoresponders are delivered. How cool is that? It used to be that you were at the mercy of when you lead signed up as to when they would receive your follow up autoresponders.
Now…you can select the days and times that autoresponders go out – therefore avoiding days such as Saturday or Friday night. I love that!!!
Keep it up aWeber…
Amber Miller
The Delegation Diva
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