Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

Twitter Mosaic is a Full Color Display of Who I'm Following

I saw this on Paul Chaney's blog and thought it was cool. Here's my Twitter Mosaic. Cool, isn't it? These are some of the people I follow vs. people who follow me. I'm not sure if the order is random or by date I followed.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

David Pogue's Basic Tech Tips

David Pogue, tech columnist for The New York Times, is one of my favorite tech writers. He is funny and always interesting and informative. I have his column emailed to me every week so I don't miss a thing.

Today's column was so useful I want to share it with you. David Pogue writes about basic tech tips that we have known and forgotten or never known at all. I was reminded of several things that I used to do to be more efficient, but somehow slipped out my consciousness.

You can hide all windows, revealing only what’s on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and “D” simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That’s great when you want examine or delete something you’ve just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.

I learned this years ago from Tom Antion, and then forgot. It's a heck of a lot faster than minimizing windows one by one.

At the time of this post, there were already 296 comments with even more great tech tips. Read Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User if you want to learn something very useful today.

Shoeboxed.com is a cool organization tool!

This isn't really related to Internet marketing, but I just learned about a really cool site that can help you be more organized. And better organization can help free up valuable time for marketing your business.

In the new Springwise newsletter, I read about Shoeboxed.com, a site where you can send all your online receipts and they'll be organized for you in one secure online account. Can you imagine how much easier it will be when tax time comes around? Instead of printing out your receipts or losing them in the mass of emails you get, they will be neatly organized in one location.

You get a personal email address that you use instead of your regular email every time you purchase something online. Your email receipt is then sent to your Shoeboxed account.

Here's the info from Shoeboxed.com's FAQ:

Shoeboxed.com is an internet startup company that is reinventing the online shopping experience. Shoeboxed.com has created a centralized website for the storage, organization, and management of personal and business receipts. It will also keep spam from reaching your personal e-mail inbox and will help protect you from online identity theft. This service is free to everyone and will help to eliminate the hassle and inconvenience of receipts. With each user's purchase history continuously updating and centrally stored, shoeboxed.com will help to simplify your life and give you more control over your personal online shopping data.

I'm pretty organized (though if you were to see my work space you wouldn't think so) and this type of service totally appeals to me. Since I have a business partner, Patsi Krakoff, and we live in different cities, we both make purchases. If we both use an account, then it will be simple for our accountant to get the necessary info when she does our books.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Gmail Video Spreads the Love

Last month the folks at Google and Gmail invited their Gmail fans to produce videos showing how Gmail travels the world.  They received 1,100 video entries and have created one video with clips from many of the very creative clips. You can also see a map showing where all the clips came from.

I'm a Gmail fan and have been using it since it was first available by invitation only.  I love the message threading, color coding of the discusions, the filters and labeling. I have all my email accounts redirected to my gmail account so I can access my email online anywhere, anytime.

Enjoy the video!

Speaking Skills: Free resources for becoming confident

If you're interested in improving your presentation skills or overcoming the fear of public speaking, our colleague Dr. Larina Kase has some free resources on confident speaking for you.

1) Here are 3 articles on public speaking anxiety.

2) Here is a charisma quiz and some more articles on storytelling and speaking for business opportunities at.

3) The Blog Squad conducted a 30-minute interview with Larina and you can listen to it here (get more great tips on blogging while you're there too!)

To access more great resources to improve your presentation skills, visit Larina's blog at www.themindsetofsuccess.com.  And of course, we recommend the book, The Confident Speaker by Larina and her co-author Harrison Monarth.

Related Posts:
Tom Antion's Advice to The Blog Squad
Presentation Challenges: How do you handle unexpected challenges?