We love being connected. People have always tried to find new and better ways to communicate. To do this, sometimes, we have to use multiple communication devices to do so. This is a big hassle and could most of the time be confusing. But what if you had something wherein you can organize and manage all your communication records, devices and contacts by using just one simple application? Wouldn’t it be easier? Well, Google has the right solution for you. It’s called Google Voice. Google Voice is an awesome, FREE service to help manage phone and contacts the same way gmail helps you manage your email. Read the rest of this entry

Stores have inventories. Brokers have stocks. Real Estate Brokers have Listing. You, as an online seller have your list. If you want to make money blogging you have to build your list.  It’s hard to sell anything if you have no interested buyers. Even if you have the best product in the whole world and the best website, if no one knows about it, then your online business will go kaput. Having a list of interested buyers makes selling online much easier.

If you are into marketing and sales, you’ve probably heard sayings like “Always be selling” or “Always be closing (the sale).” If you intend to have a successful online business, you should really “Always be list building.” It’s an online marketing basic. Everyone knows that having a well-targeted and responsive list of people is the key on how to make money blogging.  It is essential that you understand that the success of an online business comes from building relationship with a big subscriber base. It is also important that you build good relationships with people who are generally interested in the same subject area as your product or service is.  This will allow you to enter their niche and help you sell the product to them. You have to remember that the most successful online business knows that they can only succeed when the subscriber succeeds or is satisfied.

“Your List” is the list of readers, Read the rest of this entry

In the past, people would take their roll of film and get their pictures developed at the local drug store.  Getting the pictures developed was the only way to view pictures taken with film cameras.  With today’s popularity of digital cameras, people can take as many pictures as their memory cards will hold (usually thousands upon thousands) but it is not practical (or necessary) to print hard copies of every picture.  When you get your pictures home, what do you do with them?  Most people will only go as far as uploading their pictures to their computer’s hard drive, which puts their new memories at risk.  Two internet services make sharing and storing pictures very convenient and trouble-free.  Both services are examples of cloud-based storage.

The two big players are Flickr and Picasa.  Flickr is a Yahoo property while Picasa is a Google property.  Both services offer pretty much the same thing but there are some differences between the two that you should consider before clicking the “Upload” button.  Flickr places your pictures in the public domain by default, which means that anyone with internet access can view your pictures.  That may be appropriate for your sight-seeing tour of San Francisco but not so much for your Spring Break trip.  Flickr does allow you to perform some minor editing such as cropping and color fixing to your uploaded photos.  Picasa is private by default, which makes it ideal for sharing with family and friends without changing the settings of each photo album you create.  It has several powerful tools such as tagging a photo to a map and order products (i.e. mouse pads, coffee mugs, etc) using your uploaded pictures.  I like both services.  I use Flicr for pictures that I want to share and Picasa for family pictures.

Both services offer fast and easy picture uploading so their site.  You can create albums with both services so that you can organize your pictures easily.  One of the biggest benefits with either service is that you can access your pictures from anywhere and on any computer.  No longer are you constrained to viewing your pictures on your computer’s hard drive.  Now your pictures are in the cloud.   Sharing your pictures is very easy since you can send a link to family and friends for them to click on and view your pictures trouble free.

The most important benefit that both services offer is that they use redundant, cloud-based storage to keep your pictures safe.  The cloud-based storage is backed-up and secure, unlike your computer’s hard drive.  Keeping your pictures on your computer’s hard drive puts them at risk of a virus or a hard drive crash.  In most cases of a hard drive crash, your pictures will be unrecoverable.    

I want to hear about your experience with moving your pictures to the cloud.  Do you use Flickr or Picasa?  Have you had a good or bad experience with them?  If you are not ready to move all of your pictures to the cloud, at least consider a service like Mozy online backup to keep them safe.