winterg1979: August 2009

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Why does the world love Lego?

Why does the world love Lego?

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Saturday, August 22, 2009

typing Yesterday, I read the “Unconventional Guide to the Social Web,” and although I found a lot of useful information in it, one quote has stuck with me since reading it: “Your blog is your mothership. Don’t neglect it for lesser tools.”

This is an important thing to keep in mind when marketing your business online. There are tons of ways to build a web presence, including a variety of social media and networking sites, but nothing is as important as your blog.

Maintained correctly, your blog is the one tool that will get you the most traffic, and it’s the tool over which you have the most control. If you set out with the intention of posting three to five times per week, within a year, you will begin seeing significant activity around your site. Within two to three years, you could easily be an authority in your particular niche.

So, how can you make sure that you don’t neglect your blog (or your “mothership”)?

Spend time there. Visit your site or blog frequently (ideally, several times per day). This helps you stay connected with your vision for your business, and it also helps you stay in tune with the usability of your site, as well as find ways to improve it.

Keep it updated.It’s very easy to allow a month to go by without posting a single blog entry. Naturally, the frequency of your posts will depend on a number of factors, most important being your own goals for your site, but you should post on a regular and consistent schedule so that your site content remains fresh.

Engage your audience. Ask questions, make thought-provoking posts, and most importantly, monitor the comments on your blog. If someone replies to one of your posts, take the time to respond, and if you really want to impress the person, email him or her with a thoughtful “thank you for following” message.

Give it some thought. Don’t just post “filler content” to make an arbitrary quota. Really think about what your audience wants to hear. What do they want to know more about? How can you help them? Find ways to provide greater value for your readers. You’ll know you’re providing benefit when you hear clients and customers say things like, “I’m trying that idea you mentioned on your blog.”

Find ways to improve. Organize your archives a little better, add links to your social networking profiles, or spruce up your “About” page. Find ways to regularly improve your site, making it more visually appealing and more user-friendly.

Your blog is the most direct line to you and your business. It’s what new followers and visitors read to determine if you’re someone they’d like to get to know better or if you can provide value to their lives or businesses. Don’t neglect it. Consider it to be your “mothership” and take care of it as such.

In what ways do you take care of your blog? How do you make sure that it represents you in the best light possible to visitors of your site?

Image from stock.xchng by zizzy0104

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5 Ways to Spice Up Your Gmail Signature

5 Ways to Spice Up Your Gmail Signature: "

Sometimes the same old email signature day in and day out just won’t cut it. If you’re a Gmail user looking for some ways to mix it up a bit, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five ways to spice up your Gmail signature.

These tips vary from the practical to the creative to the random. If you have other tricks for adding something unique to your sig, let us know in the comments.

1. Random Signature

Feeling lucky? Maybe you have an assortment of wise and pithy quotes to share with email recipients, or perhaps you want to rotate between a number of self-promotional links. Either way, there’s a Gmail Labs feature called Random Signature that has you covered.

If you’ve never explored Gmail Labs before, just head to the upper right of your Gmail interface and click the green chemistry beaker to access this experimental but typically fairly stable features section. Scroll down until you find the Random Signature line item and click the Enable radio button to turn it on.

Then, head over to the General tab in your Settings section (again, you’ll find the Settings link in the upper right of your Gmail interface). In the Signature section you’ll see a new option underneath the regular text area where you input your sig. Checking the box will automatically append a random item after your normal signature if you use one, otherwise it will use the random item as your sig.

By default, Random Signature will pull quotes from a BrainyQuote RSS feed, but you can replace this with a file of your own. If you’re comfortable in a text editor, an easy way to generate your own feed is to use the default RSS file as a template and edit it to taste for your own needs.

2. Wisestamp

Wisestamp is a Firefox extension we covered late last year that can enhance your email signature not just in Gmail but also in Hotmail, Yahoo! mail and AOL mail.

Simply install the add-on to gain the functionality of a rich text editor for composing your email signature. Change font styles and colors, add and resize images, and add a row of icons with links to your social networking services of choice.

You can also pull in items from an RSS feed right into your signature, making it a great way to promote your latest blog post, Flickr photos, status updates, random quote, or pretty much anything you can stick into an RSS file. For a walkthrough of the Wisestamp featureset, check out the tour video below.

3. Location in signature

Frequent travelers and virtual office workers in distributed teams will especially enjoy this one. Another Gmail Labs feature, Location in Signature does just what it says: appends your current location to your outgoing emails.

location-in-sig-240 To turn it on, head to the green chem beaker Labs icon again and scroll down until you find the Location in Signature line item. Click the Enable radio button to turn it on. Then, head over to your Settings area’s General tab as we did with Random Signature above. Check the box next to “append your location to the signature.” If you also enabled Random Signature, the two can live harmoniously and aren’t mutually exclusive; just check both boxes if you like.

Once enabled, Location in Signature will use your IP address to make its best estimate of your geographic location. For improved accuracy, install Google Gears — its location module can use the nearest Wi-Fi access point to more closely pinpoint your actual location.

4. Black Canvas Gmail Signatures

Another Firefox extension, Black Canvas handles both HTML signatures and managing multiple sigs for different email addresses automatically. You can also set up to four different signatures for each address and switch between them as well.

One nice touch with Black Canvas is the live preview pane that shows what your sig will actually look like as you edit the HTML.

5. Signature Tweaks

This add-on is less about editing your actual sig and instead is about modifying where it is positioned by default. Normally when you use Gmail’s “Reply” feature, your signature gets appended at the very bottom of the email, after the quoted text you’re replying to. This isn’t always the desired behavior, and many folks would rather have their signatures be included after their reply text and before the quoted text.

That is precisely what Signature Tweaks does. Another Gmail Labs feature, you enable it by clicking the Gmail Labs beaker icon, scrolling down to the Signature Tweaks line item and clicking the Enable radio button.

Next, just reply to any message and your signature file will by default be included before the quoted text instead of after. Signature Tweaks also gets rid of the separating spacer dashes that typically appear before your signature as well.

Do you use any of these Gmail add-ons for your signature? Do you know of others? Let us know down below!

More productivity resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways To Log Into Several Gmail Accounts At The Same Time

- 13 Gmail Extensions for Firefox 3

- HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Gmail Labs

- 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers

- 7 Productivity Tips, Plus Tools for Freelancers and Web Workers