Skype is an amazing tool!

If you have friends or family far away and the cost of phoning them is getting too much, why not connect via Skype?

Skype uses your broadband connection to connect to landlines, mobile phones and other computers.

If the person you want to call also has a broadband connection then you can connect for free. All you need is a microphone and headphones and you can talk and/or online chat for as long as you like. If you both have a webcam it’s even more fun because you can see the other person talking. What a great way to connect with grandkids far away!

But that’s not all. For very low rates you can connect with landlines and mobile phones and even send text messages. Or, if you’re not online, you can get your Skype calls forwarded to another phone.

If you use the paid services you can do this either by pay-as-you-go, which means you only pay when you use the service, or a monthly subscription. Either way, the service is amazing value compared to conventional telephony.

There are a lot of options to play around with to get connected with your friends, family or business contacts.  Installing Skype is easy and free. And if you don’t already have headphones, microphone or web camera, then Skype can supply all the compatible equipment you need.

Why not give it a try? It’s great fun and getting set up is a breeze.

Click on this banner to find out more about Skype:

What’s an ‘autoresponder’?

Autoresponders are an automatic way to follow up with contacts who visit your website or blog and request more information. You present a little box that invites them to enter their name and email address and the autoresponder automatically replies and sends them back some promotional guff valuable information(!) that you hope will persuade them to buy from you.

Attempting to send autoresponders manually is a real pain. It’s time-consuming and boring and inefficient. So why not get a computer to do it for you?

Aweber is the premium brand for this type of service. They are the market leaders simply because they have everything sewn up.  Aweber knows how to get email delivered, even to the fussiest inboxes.

You may have heard of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. This is a total pain for we honest, hard-working website owners because it imposes all sorts of requirements on how to use email to deliver sales messages. The presumption is that you are a porn-spreading, hate-inciting, privacy-invading spammer and so you have to follow a load of strict and detailed requirements before you are allowed to send e-commerce mailshots. This is actually US law but it applies to everyone, wherever they are in the world, if they want to send emails to US citizens.  You can’t fight it, so you might as well comply.

Aweber helps, indeed forces you to, comply. But it makes it easy for you by taking most of the pain away.

I use Aweber myself and I am very impressed by their service. It’s not expensive and it helps me appear professional to my clients. They can see what a good girl I am because I don’t behave like a spammer. Click on the link below and get a free test drive of Aweber:

Do you love AWeber, too?

Would you like to find out how they work? Click on the image to see what they can do!

Basically, this is an example of an ‘Instant Popover’ image that you can use to attract your visitor’s attention. It can contain an attention-getting message and you would typically use it to encourage your visitor to sign up to your email list.

There are a lot of popup and popover tools for sale to webmasters. Each of them works slightly differently. Most are now a bit out of date and don’t work like they used to.

If you haven’t heard of ‘Instant Popover‘, it’s software that creates personalized unblockable popups that pop into your page, including some very attractive styles such as the peeling ads, floating popovers, post-it note designs, exit popups, and more.

I use Instant Popovers and I can confirm that these eye-catching little graphics increase opt-in and click-through rates dramatically.  Check out Instant Popovers and look at the video there to see examples of what you can do.

This particular software allows you to create thousands of different styles to your liking. It also has over 20 different post-it note images included in the software, peeling ads, floating ads and web 2.0 styles that will work with any website, not to mention that you can add any personalized, custom image of your own. There’s really no limit to what you can do with your popovers!

In my opinion this popover software is by far and away the best one on the market, and the good news is that the cost is extremely reasonable.

Find out more here>> Instant Popover

To me, John Reese walks on water. I’ve been a follower of his since the early days of the Reese Report and, following his advice, I now make my living online.

Traffic Secrets 2.0 is the successor to John’s original Traffic Secrets course which has now been updated.

There is no point in having a website or a blog if no-one visits it. If you have an online business, you have to have traffic. And John Reese knows how to get traffic.

The course is very comprehensive, covering everything from finding a market, keyword research, competitive research, SEO, social networking, video marketing and a whole raft of strategies to attract more visitors to your websites.

If this list sounds intimidating, don’t worry. John is a very effective presenter and the background material is very thorough. The course ends with a ‘Master Plan’ which is, in effect, an action plan to get from where you are to where you want to be. There are blueprints for each stage of the plan so that you can progress from one task to another. There’s a forum and a big list of online resources.

Taking this course is a major commitment, but if you are serious about building an online business, in my honest opinion, you simply cannot afford to be without it.  If you implement only a fraction of the methods outlined in the course you’ll be ahead of 95% of your competition.

Get it. NOW!

Find out more about Traffic Secrets 2.0 here.

Squidoo is one of those Web 2.0 innovations that has really taken off. What is Squidoo?

Well, it’s a way to get yourself on the web without having a website or blog. What you get is a ‘lens’ which is sort of like a blog, but not actually.

Squidoo is free to join and and you can create as many lenses as you like on different topics. You can also earn money. You can advertise your own (or other people’s) stuff and you get a share of the Adsense revenue that Squidoo makes. Here’s what they say about this:

‘Squidoo makes money from ads and affiliate links.

We give 5% of what we earn, right off the top, to charity. We keep 45% to cover our overhead and stuff.

That leaves 50%. That goes to charity or to the people who build the pages. And we leave it up to you to choose one or the other.

It’s that simple. You can earn a dollar, a nickel or a dime at a time for your favorite cause or for you.

Did we mention that Squidoo is free? Always has been’.

Squidoo lenses are also a great way to get inbound links to your blog or website because apparently the search engines love Squidoo. And Squidoo is actually quite good fun.

Ron Passfield has written a great ‘Squidoo Marketing Strategy’ ebook that explains how you can use Squidoo to get more traffic. This costs $7 but it’s well worth it >> Click here

I love BlueHost. This is where this blog, and all my other blogs and websites, are hosted.

Why do I like them so much? Well, here are a few reasons:

1. They are reliable. Once you have been in the hands of a crappy hosting company that regularly brings your site down, restores it from old backups and refuses to answer support tickets (like IPower – don’t get me started) then you know the value of peace of mind. Bluehost’s downtime is minimal.
2. They are professional. I have had few occasions to seek technical support from them but whenever I have needed it the standard has been excellent. The people who respond know their stuff and have dealt with me promptly and courteously.
3. They offer unlimited addon domains. That means that for the cost of one hosting account you can add as many blogs and websites on as many domains as you like. That can save you a fortune.
4. You can get automatic installation and automatic upgrading of WordPress. This takes a load of hassle out of the task of maintaining a blog.
5. Their knowledge base is great. If you need to look through their FAQs to find out how to do something the explantions are clear and up to date. This gives me confidence.
6. They are not expensive.

Find out more about BlueHost here.