Now timetracking may not be fun, but an interesting exercise our business consultant Dave Richeson put us through in 2008 proved to me that we had probably been losing on average $6000 a year – simply because we were losing a few minutes here or there on our manual record-keeping.  Not recording this phone call, or that email, simply because it was too “inconsequential” to bother to write down.  When you have several team members on a project and the project extends weeks or months it adds up.  Over a decade of being in business ‘inconsequential’ meant a loss of $60,000.  And it was not a loss we could take a tax deduction on!

Without delay we started time-tracking and not only are we more confident that we are billing more accurately, but we can also review each project when it is complete as a team.  Using our time reports we can see if we truly made a profit (more often than night we bid on projects and the fee is fixed) by being efficient, and if we didn’t, we can see objectively where we spun our wheels in the mud.  Ideally we can correct for it and not make the same mistakes in future projects.

Paymo’s TimeTracker is quite nifty. It has a free account that lets you have two people tracking time under the same projects and you can also try their tied in invoicing system (limited to 3 a month).  We don’t use that as we keep a separate invoicing system, but because all our team works as contractors, the timetracking system is perfect for us.  You can set up clients, projects, task lists and tasks.  What

My favorite feature is the Widget “popout window” that lets you track and assign your time in real time. Editing your time is in the same window under another tab.  Easy and convenient.  You can also add time in bulk to a timesheet.

In the free account you can also add your logo and feel all official and cool. Additionally it has lots of pretty bars and graphs about how I’m spending my time, which I admit I utterly ignore.   They ARE pretty eye candy but take a little flash load time when first logging on.  Small inconvenience.

The only other thing I find even the slightest bit annoying is being forced to have a task list and one task under it – if you delete it then your project doesn’t show up on the menu.  Sometimes a project is small and I just want to put time to the project.  Seeing default task list and default task everywhere initially was a bit confusing.  That said, sometimes we do need that level of detail so it is good to have it.

Overall this is a great service.  We give it 4 out 5 wingflaps.

I hope this has been helpful.  For us it is the perfect tracker and we know we can upgrade as we need to a paying account.  But every business has different needs – if you have a free (or low cost) time tracking service you like, and that would be useful to our small business followers, please comment and let us know!

I have been an avid Firefox user for several years.  And I wouldn’t have even looked at Chrome (despite being a Google girl) except it seems every update of Firefox brings new problems.  After the last update I ended up having to remove all my extensions just to get it to work without crashing.  And then, soon after,  it developed some sort of ghost that seems to render download links useless. It started with Google – everything I tried to download had a bizarre name and .part extension, and then it seemed I couldn’t download any file from any site.  After some research that yielded zero results, I have just struggled with the issue losing a lot of time and growing grayer by the day.  Not pretty.  Whenever I needed to download something I would open up Chrome and do it there.  Heinous, I know – but I just wasn’t ready to give up my familiar FF toolbar.

They fixed the Bookmark Manager (for Macs)

Besides I had tried Chrome when I first installed it – I have a Mac and several months ago the book manager was non-existent.  Tonight though, while downloading a PDF, I was fooling around, and wahlah – a bookmark manager!  And a very nice intuitive one as well.

Snappy Extensions

So I thought, why not – lets go check Google Chrome extensions - is there anything to replace Twitbin I wondered?  And while I didn’t find an exactly perfect replacement (I like the sidebar feature rather than the popup) Chowerty turned out to be a usable option.  Okay, not a bad start.

As I started to look for and add other needed extensions I was quite taken by how fast you could add extension without restarting.  Literally – 3-5 seconds to add an extension and start using it. When I was adding FireFox extensions I remember it was hours of research.  Some things worked, some didn’t.  This time within 30 minutes I had found, installed and understood how to use every extension I needed. In short.  User friendly to the max.

Bonus is nothing is buggy and everything seems compatible.

Here are some of my favorites:

Google GMail Checker Plus - Now this is awesome.  Not just does it tell me how many are in my inbox unread, but I can manage my mail through the popup.  I expect this to be quite a timesaver.  Again, it is probably available for FF, but it is the ease at which I found it, installed it, and started using it that blew me away.

Google Docs – Like in Google Mail I can actually search and find docs in the popup window.  In my FF toolbar it was just a link to my Docs home.

Chrome SEO - for designers and developers – or the business owner that is avid about their site’s competitiveness, this is quite the tool.  Get stats on any page you are on – how many pages are indexed by search engines, backlinks and much more.  QUITE NIFTY.

Incredible Start Page - very nice organization of the home page with a custom sticky note, easy management of favorite links and just a nice interface.  Fast loading, too.

Note Anywhere – sticky note any page you are on for later review.  Just about the coolest thing I’ve seen in awhile.  Course maybe I don’t get out much…

Webpage Screenshot – gets a screenshot of the whole page – not just the viewable area.

Webdesigners, there is even more, so be sure to check out Geekers Magazine Top 10 Best Google Chrome Extensions for Web Designers, & Graphic Alerts 15 Must Haves – or just do a Google search and you’ll find plenty of folks chiming in on their favorites.

The Best For Last – It Works

Doing some research for this post I stumbled upon two sites that had some script that killed the page load.  If it had been FF I would have watched the spinning wheel for 10 minutes until I finally gave up and rebooted my computer.  On Chrome within a few seconds I got a happy nonresponsive warning and it actually let me push the button to kill the page!  Happy camper am I.

Knowing that it will wake your sleeping partner if you try to stumble around, untangle the cords, and unplug your laptop in the dark, instead furtively start it up, begin tapping furiously away -and wake them anyway.  Ah, the morning is starting well.  Banished to the other end of the house and warmed up, you are now in a better position to generate some real mayhem.

1. Log into your project management system (or equivalent) and take screenshots and detailed notes of every quirk, no matter how minor, that has been getting under your skin for the last few weeks.  Note that ‘minor’ is the keyword here.  Generate 10-12 new tasks for your development team to deal with these annoyances asap. Even better, don’t actually pass on the screenshots or details, rather just make vague ramblings about how frustrated you are and how they need to be fixed yesterday.  You can imagine this will help get their day off to a great start!

2. Promote your own expertise and your business by finding relevant blog posts and providing pithy commentary. This is critical because everyone knows that you are at your most witty at (now) 4 am.  You will shine!  And nothing is more satisfying in the wee hours than doing a little damage you just can’t make right.  If you haven’t killed enough time at this point, move on to Twitter.

3. Log onto your business’s Facebook fan page and make tiny little changes here and there. Nothing obvious – just small details, tweaks really -improvements- that ultimately will make your co-administrator, who exclusively manages the page,  think they’ve gone lost their mind when they find them.  Alternatively, post a blog about your work so your FB administrator will spend the next day trying to figure out exactly what the h$#%% you did do.  It’s like an easter egg hunt and what better way to promote team spirit than a little challenge?

Now, don’t you feel productive?  Much better than staying in bed and fruitlessly trying to sleep, wasn’t it?

If you are also up in the witching hours and stumble across this post – please feel free to follow the advice of #2,  join the cause, comment and add your own techniques to this list.  The next time a sleepless night passes I’ll do a little queenly arbitration.  Maybe I’ll approve spam, maybe I’ll approve your comment. Baaaahhrrawwww.

Small businesses are short on marketing budgets, so lets talk about free. One of my favorite things!  Free blogs have limitations -especially when it comes to including advertising and linking to items you sell* – but if you are a small business that wants to use a blog to establish your expertise and generate more traffic to your website, then free is the way to go.

Cindy Meehan-Patton of Shelter Ecology just launched her blog to establish her expertise as a healthy interiors specialist.  She writes articles and then links back to her website where she sells inexpensive E-articles that provide more depth.

WordPress.com, Blogger.com and Blog.com are all free blog services.  We recommended WordPress.com to Cindy because of its high popularity ranking with users, good article ranking in search engines, spam filters, and because we could train and support her efforts.  One thing WordPress.com doesn’t have are photo galleries.  She doesn’t need it, but a friend who is posting missionary relief work photos from Haiti was looking for a blog solution that did.  Doing your homework is critical.

Usability is also important.  In this instance Cindy wanted hands on support.  And we provide that for WordPress.com.  But if you are a do-it-yourselfer we recommend signing up for each service you are interested in (hey, it’s free!) and testing so you can gain a true picture of which you like to work with, and which provides the best roundup of features to meet YOUR needs.

1) Research other blogs to get a feel for what you like and dislike.
If you run a keyword search on Google you can filter results to just see blogs.

2) Create your list of desired features and prioritize them as must haves, would like to haves and nice, but not important.

3) Research blogs to see what best matches your feature requirements.  Here are some resources to help get you started:

Great list of features to consider and a review of several blogging platforms including two free – WordPress and Blogger.

A user’s comparison of Blogger versus WordPress.  Very well written and easy to understand.

*List of free blogging sites that allow you to integrate AdSense ads

Favorite Free Resource of The Month

Remote Desktop Sharing & Virtual Meeting Space
http://www.mikogo.com

Communicating visual ideas, guided presentations, or demonstrating processes to someone outside your office are a “virtual” snap with Mikogo.

This cross-platform application (works with both PCs and Macs with an Intel chip) is our favorite application for working remotely.  It is easy to install and completely free.  And by free we mean no ads or limitations, with the exception that you can only have 10 participants in your meeting at one time.  And that’s not much of limitation in our estimation!

We tried a lot of sharing programs and this is by far our favorite because its so easy to start a meeting and even easier for your participants to join.  Just point them to the website, have the click on “Join A Meeting”, enter the session ID you provide and their name, and then the app loads in the background for them – the whole process taking less than a minute.  We are using it to:

• Provide technical support: We’ve helped our clients troubleshoot processes, like email settings & setting up their spam filters – it’s incredibly easy when we can see everything they are doing!
• Demos:  We can show a person on the other side of the country how the Site Ducky administration panel works, answer their questions and demonstrate features as if we were sitting side by side looking at the same computer screen.
• Conduct team meetings:  Call in number for audio among more than two participants (also free – we’re amazed over here!)  And if Windows is running the meeting there is also a whiteboard option to help communicate even more clearly.

Full List Of Features

There are some differences between the MAC and PC versions, but since we’ve been using Mikogo we’ve seen their developers working hard to ensure MAC is stable and we’ll forgo some of the plummier features for an app that works reliably.

Our favorite way to use it is with JING – a screen and screencast capture program we’ll be highlighting next month.

It was just this week that I discovered of the 10% of users still plugging along with this nine-year old behemoth, one of them was my own boyfriend! Aiyeee!! There was the comical V-8 slap on the forehead moment when I realized his constant susceptibility to having his PC infected with nasty “Trojan Horses” was due less to the fact he wasn’t keeping his anti-virus updated as he was still running IE6.

That prompted me to write this article  – yes, some of you (I’m not naming names) are still running IE6.  This article is designed to help save you some pain.

Don’t assume – what version of Internet Explorer are you running?

If you are using Internet Explorer, open it up and click on the HELP menu at the top of your browser window and then choose ABOUT.  You’ll get a box similar to this.  What you are looking for is whether you are running Version 6.0 (and something), 7 or 8 (see the red box on the image below).

If you are on IE6 or IE7 it’s time to upgrade.  You won’t lose anything, but you will certainly gain better (albeit not perfect) security.  Find instructions to upgrade in just 4 steps at the end of this article.

Consider other browsers…

One thing web designers and developers are encouraging their clients to do is – take this opportunity to look at other browsers.  Internet Explorer, across three versions, holds on to less than 30% of market share.  They’ve lost their domination in the marketplace because other browsers often do a better job.  Specifically, there are web standards – called w3c compliance – that other browsers started adhering to years ago.  This means that users can experience sites the way they were meant to be viewed and that security risks are minimized.  Here are three of the most common browsers that perform better in tests against IE8…just to give you an idea of what you might be missing (all will work PCs or Macs):

A more comprehensive browser comparison.

But what about that security you mentioned?

Stick with IE?  Or go with one of the other options – which one offers the best security? Between you, me and the fence post it all depends who you listen to – there are loud voices clamoring on all sides of that argument.  So in my humble opinion, although I am rabid anti-Microsoft being an Apple girl, there really is no clear winner, and all of the browsers are working hard to keep at the cutting edge for their users.  Here’s a good link to a CNET article comparing the different security features across all these browsers (including Opera 10).

Additionally, Firefox also recently patched version 3.0 (2008) to help extend its shelf life.

Only 4 Steps To Upgrade IE 6 To IE8…

Okay, you’re not convinced and want to stick with IE.  To get you started, head over to the IE8 Home Page and choose Download from the menu:

Steps 1 & 2 – the only hard part here might be selecting your operating system.
As an Apple girl myself I was clueless as to what Rick’s PC was:

Step 3 - Download

Step 4 - Install & Wa-la!  Now wasn’t that easy?  And trust me it will save you a lot of grief!

FYI: if you love IE 7 – then one thing that you’ll like about IE8 is that it features an IE7 Simulator.  In IE8 just open Tools -> Developer Tools -> Browser Mode -> IE7.

Still need more convincing?

YouTube: “There Must Be 50 Ways To Leave IE6″
TechXav http://bit.ly/cGCA38

1 – Review your apps and find the most efficient ones for the way you want to work. Top Twitter Apps

Now there are oodles of apps out there.  Certainly hundreds and maybe thousands.  While you don’t want to get bogged down researching them (this can be a whole ‘nother addicting habit), don’t overlook references to those that are up and coming.  What you want are niches that meet your unique needs.  For example, twtQpon lets you offer coupons on Twitter.  This same service links to others that let you create Twitter invitations, greeting cards and create polls.  And you can record a video message of yourself to add to your profile with BubbleTweet.  If you allocate some time to getting familiar with what exists it can help you be more creative as you determine your strategy.

2 – You’re getting a lot of followers and need to automate how you do some things. But be sure you understand the controversy about automated Direct Messages (DM) before you decide if they are for you or not. Some services let you set up an automated Direct Message Tweet to be sent out to anyone that follows you.  Sounds good right?

If you are getting 20+ new follows a day and you want to thank each one signing up for an auto DM service might be tempting, but be sure to understand the other side of what is a heated discourse about this subject.  Many Tweeters have DMs go to their mailboxes as DMs often come from friends and family sharing more personal information.  Automated DMs are akin to spam in this instance.  Listen long enough and you will hear lots of angry tweets about DMs.  Much less blog posts.  Just to give you a sample here’s a rant FOR auto-DM’s and one AGAINST auto-DM’s.

Also how do you tell a genuine DM from an automated one?  There is no real way to know and many folks are clever with their auto-DMs.  This can be very frustrating if you are trying to build real relationships and want to spend your time on authentic conversations.  That’s my ‘ole two cents.  Just ensure that DMs fit your strategy before deciding to use them yourself.

If you don’t like DMs consider using two (in conjunction) opt-out services SocialToo and @optmeout.  We still get DMs every once in awhile after follows, but I’d guess it took care of 95% of them.

3 – Create a unique and authentic voice. Many Tweeters have been successful promoting their own services exclusively, by becoming mavens, by engaging in conversations, by Tweeting witty or positive things, by retweeting (RT) interesting little known articles, or by simply being bizarre and interesting.   Mashable has some good things to say about this.  My favorite Tweeters have nothing in common – some post very relevant Tweets but engage in little to no conversation while others Tweet mostly personal nuggets about their life.  Neither is right or wrong and I would be willing to contact either for business (but for very different reasons in this instance – one is an expert and the other “feels” more trustworthy).

4 – Your photo is your brand. How does it look as it streams down the page with all the other Tweets?  Does it stand out?  Does it represent your message?  Is it appealing?  I mention the last because yes, I have actually not followed (probably very interesting) Tweeters simply because their photo was creepy.  I just didn’t want to see that photoshopped (I guess they thought it was edgy) horror going by on my screen and then intruding in my psyche.  You can’t please all the folks (you are going to resemble somebody’s ex) but it’s worth a little thought.  Bright colors and closeups work better than distance shots. Some women seem to do well with sexy shots…again, your call.  What is crucial of course is simpy ensuring your photo reflects your unique message.

5 – Create a good-looking Twitter background for your profile page. A Twitter background helps you to continue establishing your brand and your personality.  Makes you more memorable and interesting.  People follow people that are interesting to them.  Twitbacks lets you create a free custom background, and Twitterbacks also has specs for designing your own.  Remember though – test it out by scrunching your browser window to smaller and larger proportions.  I use many sidebars with Firefox and most folks backgrounds are obliterated by the smaller browser window.  It’s almost impossible to make it work for everyone – try to accommodate as many as possible, though.

6 – Don’t take it personally! This is my favorite tip.  Make this your mantra: I am not back in high school.  This is not a popularity contest.  I have a great service or product to offer and my mother likes me -even if no one else does. It really is a big online cocktail party or kaffee klatch – whichever is your drink of preference.  Some days you’re going to feel ignored, some days you’re going to find your best friend.  It’s a networking tool.  Mingle.  Keep moving.  Cultivate those relationships that bring the most pleasure and potential to the table (again, keep YOUR strategy in mind).  Just stick with it.

Caveat: Yes, for some people it IS about popularity and numbers.  That’s fine – they have THEIR strategy for what they are trying to achieve and you have YOURS.  Bottom line is what works for you?  There are a lot of ponds out there.  When you’re a small business the most lucrative niches are the small ones.  You don’t have to be swimming with the sharks in the big one, unless, of course, that’s what pushes your happy button!

7 – Learn the rules…then break them.  Wisely. All great artists studied their craft to the nth degree – then went out and proceeded to break all the rules.  It relates to Twitter just as much.  Here’s a great Mashable article (@mashable – must follow IMHO – In My Humble Opinion) about 5 People Who Broke The Rules of Social Media and Succeeded.  And all because once you think you got it all right, you’ll find You’re All Wrong About Twitter!

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We wrote this article though to reveal some quick things that aren’t so obvious immediately. We hope they can help you from learning things the hard way and wasting time. Because time is exactly what the small business owner has in short supply.

1. Unless you are selling a book or EBook or selling something with NLP or MLM techniques you won’t want to replace your regular website. There’s a lot of discussion about this on the web, and granted Site Ducky exists to provide content managed websites, but as a user I feel comfortable making this recommendation.  Blogs are essential and often part of making a buying decision (do I like the people and culture behind a product?) but their structure is not set up for disseminating product or service information in a quick and efficient way.  Blogs are structured for discovery.  If you think you could benefit from the circular linking and never-ending scrolling, though, consider imitating Tiny House Design.  For what they are selling, and the culture they are creating around their idea, the blog structure works admirably well.
2. Even if you don’t know HTML, you can take advantage of some basic tags to help organize your posts. Not everything useful is in the toobar.  Just choose the HTML tab in your editor, and then scroll to find the place in the text you want to modify.  HTML For Dummies can be found at any library.  Don’t be afraid, play around and preview.  Some code will work – others won’t.  WordPress for example strips out line breaks from bulleted lists.  Our favorites to supplement the visual editor?
   1. <hr/> creates a horizontal line
   2. <br> creates a single line break (shift-return works in some editors in visual mode to create the same result)
3. Use HTML in your comments when allowed. Especially to link back to your own blog or website when a field isn’t offered…like on this post.  Try it!  Just write your comment and then drop in the following code replacing the bold items with your own information: <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com“>Your Name</a> Feel free to try it below letting us know how you liked this post!
4. There are different blogging tools out there.  Rather than reinvent the wheel read this and review the different blogging tools before you start to determine which best meets your needs. You’ll be investing time into learning how to use the tool you choose, setting up your theme and customizing your blog.  You don’t want to waste that.  While we like wordpress.com, the free version that they host (and we use currently) does NOT ALLOW CUSTOM SCRIPTING.  This means you can’t add widgets – from Widgetbox, if you’re an Amazon affiliate, or hundreds of other services that are providing neat stuff.  If you anticipate that you’ll need anything beyond what WordPress.com provides, you should consider other options.
5. Preview, DON’T Update, your blog with every revision. I was particularly guilty of this.  I don’t know why, but psychologically I just want to hit that update button a lot.  In some subscription feeders a notice goes out EVERY TIME you update an article.  EGADS!  No wonder some of our first subscribers ran away (come back, please, I’ve learned my lesson I promise!)
6. If your blogger of choice doesn’t provide it, use a tool like Feedburner to track your subscriptions and provide buttons for your readers to subscribe to your blog via email or their feedreader.  You can see how we use them in the column to the right under the heading “Subscribe To This Blog”.
7. If you reference a link to another blog in your article, be sure to “send trackbacks”. Understand and do this from the getgo.  Don’t just ignore that field!  Let the owner of the article know you are quoting them.  This increases goodwill and helps increase the visibility of your blog especially as Google and other search engines start giving more weight to what “virtual neighborhood” your website exists within.  Problogger’s Beginners Guide to Trackbacks
8. Twitter your new blog articles. This is one of the best platforms for announcing your new article en masse and assuming you are providing information expected by your followers, will be welcomed.
9. Use a tool like Technorati to help you increase your blog’s visibility and to see who is talking about what you wrote (you won’t always get trackbacks). Again, like some other apps we’ve tried, once you join, it’s not obvious how to find this information.  On the home page it’s on the right in a little box.  Click on your blog name.  Or just go under Blogger Central Tab > Claim Your Blog > and then after you’ve claimed it, click on it to get a URL like this: http://technorati.com/blogs/smallbiztrends.com (only your blog will be at end of the URL – not smallbiztrends.com, which is a great site by the way worth bookmarking and following – on Twitter @smallbiztrends).  You can see your rank and down at the bottom “reactions”.  They also have a great tool for determing how powerful your tags are called “Charts”, also under the Blogger Central Tab.

More articles of interest:

Article about custom HTML for Blogger (for those more comfortable using HTML)

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You can add this free ShareThis button to a website page or a blog page and when clicked, your visitor can choose which social networks they belong to that they the want to share your information with. This is quick and handy, allowing them to share your info across a lot of systems in a couple of clicks.  We like the ShareThis button because options popup on the page you are on, rather than sending you to another page, requiring an additional step.

You can see how it works on the Site Ducky website (it took us five minutes from registration to integration throughout the site using the Site Ducky WCMS).

Just requires registration and knowledge to put the code into your site.  If you use Site Ducky as your content management solution – you already have the tool – and if you aren’t sure quite what to do, just click on our chat support, email or give us a call – we’ll help you do it as part of our unlimited support.

HOWEVER: If you use a free WordPress (.COM) blog, adding any sort of scripting is ‘forboten’ (as they say if you are from the Old World).  So this won’t be of use.  But don’t despair, just keep reading…..!

We use WordPress.com and so we are in the same boat.  For our posts we like the two options below.  The first one, the single  AddThis allows more options, but you do have to go to a page to select the options (meaning your user has to click twice to get where they are going to post. It’s not a huge deal, it’s commonly used,  and it’s better to have some sort of social bookmarking tool on your post, than none.  And it’s very easy to add.

You can sign up for your own AddThis button. There are different “looks”, you can create one that sends an email, and even do some co-branding on your button (or if you prefer below the next option is a link where you can just grab the code with instructions for integrating the button without an account).  If you set up your own AddThis button just make sure you are grabbing the HTML code especially for WordPress.com.  If the code you grab starts with <php?… it won’t work.

We also like to add the following toolbar, which shows the most common social media sites people post to, because  your visitor can click and go immediately to their favorite service to finalize the posting process. Making it easier for your visitor will help ensure they actually finish the process of posting your information.  However this takes more work to integrate into each post as you customize with your blog URL and title.  We choose to do both simply for our visitor’s convenience.

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Instructions for creating the two instances above, and a good support forum thread about this issue, can be found here (click).

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