Image via CrunchBase

Backing up your website is a crucial task, and one which is mostly left to the nebulous “web hosting company” in most web owners minds. It’s one of those things that you assume is done, and expect will be handled for you – and for the most part, you would be right. Except when you’re wrong.

Servers crash. We’ve experienced our own set of unprecedented series of events and that’s meant that we look at how we back our systems up from both a web host perspective – but also from the website owner’s perspective. What we’ve learned is that while we do a good job of backup to the Amazon Storage Service on a weekly basis for email and the larger files, from a web owner’s perspective we need to have our own set of files for our sites.

Since we use WordPress for all our sites, this is actually (now) pretty easy. We’ve used a plugin to backup each WordPress site to Amazon Storage, which is really cheap – less than $2 per month for most sites, but requires a bit of configuration and manipulation. It’s fine, but not for the non-geek, in my opinion.

Here’s an even easier option: WordPress Backup to Dropbox – a simple plugin that makes use of the Dropbox storage system, which we use for all our backups and syncs between computers anyway. You get up to 2GB free, which is generally more than enough for the average WordPress website.

Image via Wikipedia

Look, I make no secret of the fact that I’m a Gmail Fan-Girl. It’s true. Here’s yet another reason why:

Background Sending

One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.

Now they’ve added a Lab Feature to improve sending. No more waiting for large attachments to upload. It does it all in the background.

Nifty, huh?

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Facebook users can now tag their friends, Pages, apps, Groups, and Events in comments to news feed stories and wall posts to create linked mentions. This is a huge boost for connectivity and a feature that’s been lacking since they rolled out tagging back in September, 2009

To use the feature, simply type the @ and a few letters of the name of the person or business you want to tag. They’ll get a notification when they’re tagged, too.

The one I find myself playing with the most lately is Google Chat. I used to use MSN Messenger (for nearly 8 years!) but found that having multiple chat platforms was a pain – that, coupled with the fact that most of my friends were migrating away and I needed a mobile solution for my Blackberry made the need to leap more urgent. Since it’s already integrated with Google’s Gmail, it made for a seamless switch.

It just keeps getting better and better and for the past month I’ve taken advantage of one of the coolest features yet – letting Remember the Milk remind me (automatically) via Chat! If you’re not familiar with RTM, be sure and check them out – we devote lots of time to them in GeekSchool for a reason!

Here’s how it works:
I added rtm.remind@gmail.com as a friend in my Google Chat List:

They don’t need to approve it, you’re ready to go on the Google side just by doing this. The official address is rtm.remind@gmail.com

Now, for the magic part. Go into your Remember the Milk account, click on settings and then reminders. Change your reminders to include Google Talk:

That’s it! I can also setup Twitter and Email… but WHY? I’m already in my email and I don’t have to wait! Neat, huh?

Here’s why. Remember when you signed up for Facebook and you were asked all those silly questions? Remember when you had to verify your email address? You probably added where you went to school, your hometown and whether you were married and what you were looking for (Men? Women? Friendship? Networking?)

You had to add (gasp!) your birthday. You were invited to add your siblings, children and other little details that let you connect with old friends, colleagues, family and networks.

Then you started to “like” things. Pages, people and businesses. Little by little you created a well-rounded profile of who you are, what you like, where you live and what you do. Facebook was stalking you, and you didn’t even know it.

And that, friends, is marketing gold.

If you’ve done any advertising on Google AdWords, or Bing or any of the hundreds of search engines, you know it’s still spray and pray. You spray an offer or a promotion out there and you pray that you’ve hit the right market based on keywords. It’s a very in depth art, and there’s quite a bit of science behind it, there’s no doubt.

However.

It’s still Google’s “best guess” based on their limited aggregated information. They have far too little information to make a precise guess, and there’s too few details to really focus in on the core market you’re trying to attract.

Facebook has those details. Lots of them. And a built in audience, too. With just a few clicks you can target whatever demographic you think makes sense for your business.

Looking for scuba enthusiasts to fill a dive trip to Cozumel, but only want folks over 50, married living in a 50 mile radius of your office? You got it.

Facebook ads allows you to target – with laser precision – people. People, not keywords.

That’s why it’s a game changer.

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Want to learn more about Facebook, Fan Pages, FBML and advertising? Come hear Chelle Honiker Yarbrough at the TRADEShow in Orlando, September 11-13, 2010, or Register for GeekSchool – the online technology learning hub for busy professionals.

Every year we go through the same thing – resolutions and the hope of a fresh start. It’s the same every year for some of us, am I right? This year, however, I started my quest for ULTIMATE ORGANIZATION (go back and re-read that with a sports announcer’s voice – it’s cool, trust me)

ULTIMATE ORGANIZATION

For me, it meant managing a growing business, opportunities, and new media in ways I hadn’t needed to before. It meant being on the road a little more, using my tools a little better and not letting the tools or tech take so much time that I wasn’t getting productive things done.

I started my quest by looking at the things that I do really well, and do right. Email. I’m an email genius. I purge. I delete. I save things for later and group them so I can reply. And then… I don’t reply and I end up with 100 emails that need attention – but there’s no junk in there! What? Wait. That doesn’t seem efficient now does it?

Resolution #1 – Reply and get it out of my box. Check my email 3 times a day.
I’ve turned off my email notification so I don’t get the sound or popup when email comes in. If someone needs me sooner than 3 hours then they can call or text. I will reply to every mail and only “touch” things once.

Resolution #2 – Check my Blackberry Email, but don’t delete.
I get almost 200 emails per day, and all of them come into my Blackberry, so I changed the setting on my Blackberry to purge them every 14 days – that’s the minimum number of days. I now have to control my urge to keep that box clean; I only read the messages and reply if I need to. So far, it’s working well and saving me at least 30 minutes a day.

Resolution #3 – Sync or Swim
I decided a long time ago to use Gmail for my email management. I have more than 30 email addreses, but Gmail keep them all straight and no one needs to know I’m using Gmail – I reply with whatever business address (chelle@travelwebmarketing.com, for example) that they were sent to.  All of them are in one place for archiving, searching and management – but they also go to my Blackberry seamlessly, with no overlap. I also sync my Google Calendar, Contacts and Tasks (more on those later this week).

Resolution #4 – Keep Track of Social Media
I’ve got an entire post dedicated to HootSuite coming later this week, but with this week’s updates – being able to post to a Facebook Fan Page and connections with more than one account – it’s changed my life. I can keep an eye on things in a non-intrusive way with very little time loss.

So – touching things less,  using simplified technology and ignoring most of the noise. I think that’s a good start. What about you? What tips do you have to share this year?

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For years I’ve been hollering at conferences, training sessions, teleclasses and even once in a movie theater at a CEO to never, never, never, ever, never use webmail programs like Hotmail or AOL for your business address. Domain names are cheap and hosting is cheap and it’s…

YOUR BRAND

… and you don’t want to build up someone else’s brand. No one is going to remember chellesawesometravel@yahoo.com when they want to book with you. You aren’t ‘in all your clients’ contact lists” and shouldn’t change it.  Trust me on this,  it looks like you share an email address with a 15 year old kid on MySpace 22 hours a day.

So, I’ll say this ONE LAST TIME.

Get a real email address that matches your domain name and use it. You’re a professional. This is a Big Deal.

Are we clear? Now. Once you’ve done that, go get a Gmail account. Yes, I’m serious.

Gmail and your own email address with your own domain name play together nicely. More than nicely, in fact. It’s a marriage made in tech-heaven.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. Web Based Goodness – meaning you’re not tied to one computer. You can get your mail on your desktop, laptop, iphone, ipod touch, Windows Mobile phone – or any other internet enabled device. There’s even special small applications for on-the-go users.
   
2. Offline Access – If you’re not connected to the Internet, the “offline” capability allows you to still work on your email and it will sync the next time you are connected.
3. Labels – Gmail calls them labels, but really, they’re tags. Tags are “IT” – they allow you to simply and easily add keywords to describe what something is about, and then archive it for retrieval later.
4. Powerful search capabilities – no more scrolling through folders. Even if you don’t label something (which you should) the search capabilities are what you’d expect from Google.
5. The Archive – This took me a little while to get used to when converting from Outlook. Instead of putting an email into a folder (which is, in essence a single label, right?) – I can add multiple labels and then archive an email. I don’t have to remember the one place where I put an email and struggle to remember what the heck I was thinking that day (taxes or receipts?) – It’s labeled with a many labels as I think are appropriate and a quick click on any one of them gets me all the emails tagged with that label. I can then refine the search further.
6. Same features I have come to know and love – Vacation Auto Responders, Signatures, Attachments, Rules (called filters)… PLUS features on steroids: Youtube, Flickr, Create Documents, Text Messaging, Maps and Calendars, to name a few.  All integrated and at my fingertips. And, there are more every day!
7. STORAGE – Any web hosting company will tell you that storage for email can get out of control. Some companies leave a feature turned on in Outlook to leave a copy of every message on the server in case… just in case… in case of what? I don’t know. It adds up and crashes the whole company’s email account when the allocation is gone. Gmail solves that. Most hosting company defaults allow 200MB of disk space per mailbox.  Gmail currently allows a whopping 7356 MB. Even after three years of heavy usage I still have only 22% of that used.

8. Account Management – I said before: Gmail and your own email address play nicely together. With Gmail account management NO ONE need ever know that you even have a Gmail address. You’re not changing your address. Let me repeat that – you’re not changing your address to Gmail. Simply configure Gmail to pull the mail from your web hosts server. Here’s the cool part: when you reply to the mail it will show the account it was sent to – Gmail remains transparent! You can have 5 POP accounts (pulling from a server) or you can have unlimited accounts if the mail is forwarded from your host and not stored there until Gmail picks it up. Either way is fine, but I set it up so that the mail would stay on my server and I could use my web host’s webmail program in case Gmail went down. Which, it hasn’t in 3 years.

9. SPAM Filtering – Despite the never-ending battle, Spam continues. Fortunately, I’m not fighting the battle – I’m back sipping mai-tai’s while Gmail does all the heavy lifting. Occasionally – maybe 10 times in 3 years – it tags something as Spam and it’s not, but I found it in the Spam folder and pushed it back to my Inbox. Only 4 times has something slipped though that wasn’t nice. I got to click the “SPAM” button to report it and move on. That’s the beauty of a shared web-program. Speed. If 5,000 people click the Spam button (I’m making that number up, of course) then it’s got to be Spam and it’s stopped for everyone else. No waiting for a patch or download. Oh, and here’s a bonus: I stopped spending money on virus programs years ago. Since they don’t come through Gmail, and I don’t click on them, I don’t get them.
   
   
10. It plays nicely with other things, too. I love a couple of Customer Relationship Managment programs like Highrise and BatchBlue. Gmail’s advanced website programming languages are common to other programs, so it syncs up nicely. If I change a contact phone number in Gmail, it’s changed in my CRM – and – my Mobile Phone. No, I did not need a Master’s Degree from MIT to set that up.

Gmail is by definition a web-based email application. By design, however, it’s a business relationship manager. Every smart business consultant will tell you that keeping all your information simple and accessible is one key to success. Gmail gives you an entire set of keys.

Here’s an overview of the plugin from the author:

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

* Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)

* Create a blog post from each of your tweets

* Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets

* Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post

* Post a tweet from your sidebar

* Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens

* Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

The integration is fairly simple and straightforward. If you need assistance you can contact WP-TravelDesign for assistance.

After installation If you’re comfortable with making a quick replacement of code, a couple of hacks that improve the quality of your posts==>tweets.

First, set your twitter tools settings to automatically create a tweet from a blog post. Then edit the /wp-content/plugins/twitter-toools.php file starting at line 171 as follows:

Change
$this->tweet_prefix = ‘New Blog Post’;

to

$this->tweet_prefix = ‘CruiseDeal’;

Or something else that more accurately reflects an intro.

and change

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s’;

to

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s #cruise #travel’;

to include the “Hash Tags” that can be searched in Twitter. Upload and test.