Brand On! | Brandon Uttley

Preview Your Email Layouts On More Than 30 Email Clients

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:00:02 -0400

Litmus

Litmus will let you check your email campaigns on more than 30 email clients and mobile browsers. You can also add small snippets of code to your outbound emails to get more advanced analytics such as how many people deleted your emails (vs. just opened them) and whether someone forwarded or printed them.

Cost: $49-$299/month

Check Email Address Validity With BriteVerify

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:00:10 -0400

BriteVerify

Use BriteVerify to check the validity of your email addresses. According to Adam Holden-Bache of email marketing firm Mass Transmit, removing bad addresses will help with deliverability. “ISPs will mark emails as junk or spam if they see too many being sent to bad or invalid email addresses,” Holden-Bache says. “Using this system to purge bad data from your database is helpful.”

You can also use BriteVerify to validate email addresses in real time for things like free downloads (whitepapers, ebooks, etc), access to coupons, sweepstakes entries, etc. It ensures the data you collect is legitimate.

Cost: $0.01 per email address

Find And Verify Email Addresses With LeadSpend

Thu, 09 May 2013 07:00:11 -0400

LeadSpend

Want to know if someone’s email address is valid? Head over to LeadSpend and check it there. I do this frequently to bypass having to try to connect with someone on LinkedIn first—just email ‘em directly! If you have a big list, you can upload it. The company claims a 97% match rate.

Cost: Free to manually check addresses; bulk pricing for uploaded lists starting at $0.01 per email address.

Get The Essential Details About A Web Page

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:00:02 -0400

Browseo

Browseo is a web app that let’s you strip a page down to its essential information. It’s very useful for examining the structure of your web pages (or your competitors’ pages) for things like meta tags, word counts, hyperlinks, fonts and colors used and other details.

You can save a spreadsheet containing the most important data from your current session.

Cost: Free

Get Alerts With Someone Pins Your Images

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:00:05 -0400

Pinalerts

Got cool images or infographics on your website? Great! Now you can use Pinalerts to get notified when someone pins something from your site. This is a good way to instantly thank people and suggest other boards you have that they may want to follow.

Cost: Free

My Favorite Bookmarking Sites

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 07:00:27 -0400

I use quite a few tools to save or bookmark links to websites that I find useful. So I thought I’d run down my favorite ones.

Why I Bookmark

Every day, I probably save at least 8-10 links for future reference. My vast libraries of links have served me well. There’s a direct benefit between taking a few seconds to properly save and tag a link, and later saving time quickly relocating it vs. starting from scratch on Google.

I realize a lot of people don’t share my enthusiasm for bookmarking. However, I think there are some compelling reasons to get into this habit:

You often can’t recreate a search you did on Google. Think about the meandering nature of a typical web search. You might go through 5-10 sites initially trying to find exactly what you need. By saving the best link or two along the way, you’ll avoid having to repeat the process for this query.
You often won’t be able to remember exactly what you looked at or found online. However, if you take some time to add good keywords (tags) when saving a link, you can more easily jog your memory later. Google’s browser history doesn’t completely fit the bill.
You can share your bookmarks and see what others bookmarked. This latter ability is the secret sauce behind getting human-filtered search results instead of just what Google spits back.

With those points in mind, here’s what I use most frequently. By the way, I favor saving bookmarks in the cloud vs. on my laptop. I want to be able to access these anywhere I can get online.

Delicious

This is one of the original and best bookmarking services. Now owned by Yahoo, Delicious remains one of the easiest to use. I especially recommend installing one of the browser bookmarklets. When you’re on a page, just click the button, add some keywords and an optional description and save it. You can choose to make bookmarks public or private. I do both, depending on what I’m working on.

Anytime you want to search your bookmarks, just log in to the website. You can also search everyone else’s public bookmarks by keywords. This is a great place to go if you ever want to “curate” information fast.

I also installed Delicious on my iPhone, making it easier to bookmark sites there, too.

Cost: Free

Pinboard

I found Pinboard when there was a nasty rumor a couple years ago that Delicious was shutting down. Fortunately, it didn’t.

Pinboard is essentially the same thing as Delicious, but with a paid business model. There is just a small one-time fee to use it. It’s cheap, and unlike Delicious you can count on getting tech support. (Although I have contacted Delicious a few times and they’ve been very responsive.)

Like Delicious, Pinboard has browser bookmarklets and other tools to store your bookmarks. It goes a step further by letting you automatically add links you bookmark using Delicious, Instapaper, Readability and Pocket (formerly Read It Later). If you tweet, you can also add links in tweets, save Twitter favorites as bookmarks and add hashtags as tags (pardon the redundancy).

Another neat feature is the ability to have tag “bundles” or related groups of links.

Cost: $10.08 (one-time fee)

Xmarks

As I mentioned, I don’t really save links from the browser on my local computer. However, if you like to do this, Xmarks is great. I set it up along time ago and it’s still a backup for old stuff I saved.

Xmarks is the No. 1 bookmarking add-on. It synchronizes your local bookmarks across multiple computers, and across web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

After you install the add-on, click on the Xmarks icon to start backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks.

Xmarks also synchronizes your open tabs across computers and browsers.

Cost: Free

Diigo

I have tried Diigo sporadically, and it is a very good service. It might become my No. 1 all-in-one bookmarking tool.

Diijo is more like Evernote-Meets-Delicious, allowing you to do more stuff like add highlights to pages along with notes. Other excellent features include a quick “read later” button and the ability to take a screenshot in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Cost: Free; $20 or $40/year for premium accounts

For “Temporary” Bookmarking: Pocket And Instapaper

I typically look at a lot of sites on a daily basis, but I don’t have time to read everything right away. So I frequently will use one of several services to temporarily save the page or article. The two I like the most are Pocket and Instapaper. I use both intermittently and lately have gravitated more to Pocket. They work very similarly.

When I use Pocket, my goal is to review these “temporary” placeholders regularly (like once a week). At that point, I can decide if I really want to save the link forever. If something is truly outstanding, I will also use Evernote Clearly to grab the full text.

Cost: Free

A Couple Others To Check Out

There are some very interesting “2.0” type bookmarking services (such as Bo.lt and Keeeb). I recently started using Bo.lt and am liking it for saving whole web pages intact. See my earlier review of Bo.lt.

Cost: Free

So there you have it. I’m a confessed Bookmarkoholic.

How To Remember The People You Meet

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:00:21 -0400

Click the image to watch the video

Do you meet a lot of people in person? Do you ever have trouble remembering their names and faces, and where you last met them? If so, Evernote Hello might the app for you.

Andy Cordia of Nuance Labs recently reminded me about Evernote Hello. Now, I love Evernote (the flagship product), but I admit I just haven’t been smitten with Evernote Hello. However, it has some neat features—so I keep hoping the app (for iPhone and Android) will improve to the point where I think about using it regularly.

Essentially, it is a way to add information about people you meet, and later review when you met and what you were doing. You can do this by connecting someone (in the app) via your social networks or by entering their information manually. I personally would do this myself, although I would feel weird saying, “Hey, let me enter your contact info…just hang on a minute…” Even weirder is the suggestion to “pass your phone” to the person and ask them to enter their info. No way, Jose!

There is a potentially promising feature in the app called Hello Connect, in which several people launch it at the same time and instantly beam each others’ information to the group. That sounds like a great idea in theory…but I doubt many people have this app. Perhaps if you promoted it ahead of time for a big event, it would be worth reminding people to use it at regular intervals.

Finally, you can use it to scan someone’s business card later—though personally I find CardMunch much better for this—and that app (free for iPhone only) can more easily add the information to your phone’s address book.

Cost: Free

Base: Big CRM Features For Less

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:00:27 -0400

Base is slick, easy to use and affordable CRM platform. Use it to capture leads and track your sales pipeline, then qualify those leads and convert them to contacts and deals.

Link to other sites like Facebook and Mailchimp in order to share data, as well as import contacts from Google Apps, Highrise, Excel and other places.

Several key features include:

A simple lead capture form that you can embed in your site
A “Client Space” where you can communicate back-and-forth with a prospect as you work to close their business
A Contacts database
Over 20 reports including total incoming deals, forecasted sales, deal source performance and more
A free companion app called QuoteBase that helps you create basic yet reasonably attractive online quotes to send to prospects

You can also send and receive phone calls directly within Base CRM on your computer, mobile phone and tablet. Track all calls related to Leads, Contacts and Deals. Listen to recorded calls and use advanced analytics and reporting to improve your team’s sales performance.

Cost: Free (up to 50 accounts), then $15-$125 per user/month depending on the features

Easily Track Mileage & Expenses With Taxbot

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:49:03 -0400

It’s tax time (ugh!). If you log a lot of billable miles for work, you will surely appreciate Taxbot at this time of year. The app (for iPhone, Android and web) let’s you track your business mileage using your phone’s GPS. To do so, you must launch the app first and type in your destination. Then Taxbot will magically track and record the mileage. It also lets you snap photos of receipts and store them in the cloud. At tax time, you can print reports of all your business expenses to deduct them on your tax return.

Here’s the rub—it’s not cheap. However, as part of the monthly fee, you also get access to a bunch of tax-saving video lessons from financial expert Sandy Botkin. He advises businesses on things like how to deduct 100% of your medical expenses and reduce your risk of an IRS audit. In addition, you can link your bank account or credit cards, and Taxbot will look for deductions you might have missed and allow you to import them.

Cost: Free 2-week trial using the link above , then $19.99/month

Clean Up Your Twitter Account With ManageFlitter

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:00:16 -0400

Need to clean up your Twitter followers? ManageFlitter is the place to do it.

This site let’s you quickly unfollow fake accounts or people who are not following you back. There is also powerful search feature that lets you find people by keywords in their profile and follow them.

ManageFlitter includes some Twitter analytics on your followers which are marginally interesting (such as who followed or unfollowed you), but I don’t consider them essential.

Perhaps the best semi-hidden feature is the ability to automatically cross post from your Google+ account to Twitter (with a Pro account). For those of you who think Twitter is becoming less effective (I do), this will help you focus more of your time in Google+.

Cost: Free to $12/month for one Twitter account; additional pricing plans for more accounts are available

Best Tools To Create Photo Collages

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:00:16 -0400

Looking for a quick and easy way to create a photo collage? PicFrame is the best app for this and is available for iPhone and Android phones.

It features lots of effects, frame shapes and patterns, as well as sharing to other applications (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and email).

Cost: $0.99

What if you want to add a captioned font onto a photo? Over is hands-down the best app for the iPhone (I don’t know the best app for Android users—sorry). It’s fun to use, offers wonderful fonts and lots of ways to share your photos.

Cost: $1.99

If you want to add free caption overlays to photos online, use Google’s Creative Kit, which is baked into Google+. You will need to create a Google account and upload images to Google+.

Save Web Pages Intact For Reference Using Bo.lt

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:00:26 -0400

I’m a big fan of online bookmarking apps that let you save web addresses and such. But most of these only save the link and not the actual page as you originally found it. That’s too bad, because sometimes you really want to refer back to a killer design or an article that may disappear weeks or month later.

Fortunately, there’s a site that will save full pages for you called Bo.lt. It’s free and requires the Chrome browser. Any time you come across a page you want to save, you just use their Chrome extension or bookmarklet and pick the image you want to represent it with. You can also add a comment and choose a collection to put it into for easy sharing and retrieval later.

Bo.lt looks remarkably similar to Pinterest.

You can also share your Bo.lted sites to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Buffer and Pinterest.

Cost: Free

Book Corporate Calls And Meetings With Timetrade

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:00:13 -0500

Timetrade is a different way to book appointments at the corporate level. It’s a very slick online appointment scheduling system for setting up meeting or calls with new sales prospects, accelerating the sales and customer service process and making it easy and fast to interact with customers.

Timetrade lets all authorized employees integrate their calendars with the scheduling system. You can also specify scheduling “rules” using an Appointment Router to match the best person in the company to handle a specific request.

After embedding a scheduling button on your website, your customers and prospects can use it to easily request a meeting. All the right people are notified, and Timetrade emails a confirmation to everyone once an appropriate mutual date is selected.

Timetrade has a mobile app, integration with Salesforce and marketing automation services and more features, making it a very attractive productivity tool for businesses.

Cost: Free for 1 users (5 appointments per month); professional versions ranging from $49-$99/month+

Schedule Meetings More Easily With Doodle

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:00:15 -0500

Doodle lets you schedule meetings with people more easily.

We all know the hassle of composing an email, jumping back and forth between your calendar several times to find a few open slots, and suggesting your best times to someone else—then getting a reply that none of the dates work for them—then starting the process all over…

Doodle cuts down on all that back-and-forth, wasted time. You start by filling out a short form with the name of your event, the location and your name and email address. Click a bunch of dates you would like to meet and the proposed times for each day. Then you can create either a basic poll or one with a few more options, such as whether respondents can pick more than one option, and whether all responses are confidential. Finally, you send the poll using your own email address or through a free Doodle account. After everyone on the list indicates their availability, the best date “wins” and your meeting is set.

To make it even easier as the meeting organizer, you can connect your calendar (Outlook 2007 and 2010 on Windows; Google Calendar; Apple iCal and a few others). There is a mobile version and an iPhone app.

Finally, you get a personal MeetMe page you can direct people to when they want to request a meeting with you (here’s mine).

Cost: Free and premium accounts (pricing not available on their website)

Improve Your Sales and Marketing Follow-Up Efforts With Postwire

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:00:02 -0500

Postwire allows you to create personalized, private “resource” web pages. For example, Postwire is perfect for sharing specific sales materials with a prospect; welcome documents and training videos for a new customer; or support information for customers. Instead of having a trail of unconnected emails, you can keep everything in one place as you communicate with your contacts.

With a Postwire account, you can share many types of files including Word documents, images, web links, videos and PDFs.

Collections in Postwire are where you organize and manage your content. You can add content to your collections through the Postwire website, via an iPhone app, an Outlook plugin or a browser bookmarklet.

You then create a Page to share content with an individual or group. Everything you shared with someone is tracked, and you will get an email notification when a recipient opens and views what you’ve shared.

In addition, if you use a marketing automation or analytics system, you can automatically add a tracking code to every page you share. Every page viewed on your Postwire pages will then be tracked just like your website pages.

Cost: Free (up to 5 pages); $9/month (10 pages); $19/month (unlimited pages)

Beam Apps From The Web To Your iPhone

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:00:12 -0500

If you have an iPhone or iPad, Crosswa.lk is one of the coolest applications I’ve seen in awhile. It’s like an “application for apps.” What it does is allow you to bypass the cumbersome App Store and send new apps to your iPhone or iPad from the web.

Say what? You need to try it to believe it, but it works like a charm. Just search for an app at Crosswa.lk, click an installation button, enter your App Store credentials and voilà, in seconds the app will download to your device. It’s a whole lot easier than clicking, searching and typing on an iPhone and it works super fast. Plus, if you do run across an app you want while using your laptop, now you have a way to get it without launching the App Store!

For app developers, they can now add a download button on their websites. I predict we’ll start seeing this button all over the place this year!

Cost: Free

Keep Your Shared Information Updated With MyPermissions

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 08:00:23 -0500

MyPermissions is a way to clean up and secure which sites have access to your information online.

With the explosion in social networking sites the past few years, we have all started giving “permissions” to lots of sites in order to enjoy their services. That means giving up our email address and a few pieces of identity to services like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. But this sharing comes with some big potential problems: these services information permissions pages are protected by complicated and well hidden settings pages at best. As a result of those settings pages, you can end up sharing your photos, documents, locations, contacts, emails, work history, political and religious affiliations— information that you never planned to—with complete strangers.

MyPermissions is an addition to the Chrome browser that will help you quickly see all the sites you have given “permissions” to and clean them up easily. You can also get alerts when new apps gain access to your private information.

Cost: $4.99/month or you can rack up free months by sharing the site on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter

Corral Your Expenses With Expensify

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 05:47:36 -0500

Expensify is an outstanding and inexpensive service for keeping track of all your business and/or personal expenses.

There are three main ways to use Expensify:

1. Upload receipts from your computer

Upload a receipt in any of these formats: JPEG, JPG, GIF, PNG, DOC, HTML, TXT, RTF or PDF

2. Upload from your mobile phone

Install a mobile app for your iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry (does anyone still use these?) or WebOS phone and add pictures of receipts directly to your account.

3. Forward an email to receipts@expensify.com

Forward flight, hotel and any other purchase confirmations or attachments (JPEG, JPG, GIF, PNG, DOC, HTML, TXT, RTF and PDFs) to add those receipts to your account.

You can also connect your credit cards and airline accounts for eReceipt imports. There are lots of other advanced syncing and reporting features available.

Cost: Free (up 10 scanned receipts per month, then .20/receipt after that)

Watch Your Word Use Blossom With Visual Thesaurus

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:56:45 -0500

If you love words, you will become enamored with Visual Thesaurus. It is simply one of the best online tools for wordsmiths. I have paid for a subscription to this for years. (Quick side note: there seems to be a debate over the use of “enamored with” vs. “enamored of”….but I digress.)

Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. It features an innovative display that encourages exploration and learning. Every time you look up a word, you will start to understand language in a powerful new way.

Say you have a meaning in mind, like “empathy” (a favorite topic of mine). Visual Thesaurus helps you find related words, from “compassion” to “commiseration.” Unlike your dog-eared copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, Visual Thesaurus works like your brain to help you delve deeper into word associations and relationships. It encourages you to explore derivations to discover synonyms, antonyms and new meanings.

It’s a great resource for finding the right word for your blog post, tweet or book passage. Whenever I’m stuck for a word choice, I can always count on Visual Thesaurus to save the day. Often times, I’ll start there with just an idea or two, and in short order it will help me flesh out an entire post that is chock full of wonderful words. This is also fantastic for SEO purposes.

Visual Thesaurus has over 145,000 English words and 115,000 meanings. If you have children, they will also benefit from using Visual Thesaurus with their writing assignments.

Additional features allow you to:

Email word maps to friends or make some swag out of your favorite words
Save your lists for reference
See how words are used in different parts of speech
Roll over a meaning to see its definition and example sentences that express that meaning.
Improve your grammar. Meanings are color-coded to indicate parts of speech.
Explore 39,000 proper nouns. Historical figures, phrases and trademarks are included.
Hear words pronounced correctly. Visual Thesaurus offers both American and British pronunciations (Cheerio!).
Right-click on any word to launch an Internet search for images or information

Cost: Free trial version then $2.95/month or $19.95/year

Remember Everything With Evernote

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 08:58:41 -0500

Ever wish you could double or triple your brain’s capacity to remember important things? That’s sort of what Evernote does. It’s one of my favorite multi-purpose programs. Many people become pretty hooked after using it for awhile. With it, you can easily:

Save and share notes about anything, from the web, a desktop app or your smartphone
Add photos and audio notes
Instantly search text throughout all of your notes—including text that appears within photos (amazing!)
Save and organize the content of web articles your read
Tag entries with keywords
Share your notes and notebooks with others

There’s so much Evernote can do! Over time, it will become a personal encyclopedia of all the stuff you don’t want to forget. I’ve been a premium user for a few years—it gives me a lot more storage space, better offline access and top priority tech support.

Cost: Free or Premium account ($5/month or $45/year). They are also introducingEvernote Business accounts in December at $10/per person/month.

Bonus Evernote Goodness

Even better, there are a bunch of other apps that extend Evernote’s functionality. Here are a few of my favorites:

Evernote Clearly is a life-changing browser plugin (Chrome) that lets you take any web page and instantly strip away all the extraneous photos and ads—leaving you with a gorgeous, easy-to-read page. To save it, simply click a button and it will send the whole clean page to your Evernote account. For premium Evernote users, there is now button that will read the page to you out loud! (Cue the female robot…)

Before Evernote Clearly:

With Evernote Clearly:

Cost: Free

Everbot is an new Chrome plugin that brings Evernote functionality to Gmail, Outlook and Google Calendar. It will allow you to easily share individual notes or entire notebooks when composing an email (note: this is a very easy way to make a shareable web page). You can also save email content you received straight into your Evernote account.

Using Everbot in Gmail:

Example of a Shared Evernote Page:

Cost: Free

Everclip is a great app for iPhone users. It enables you to capture website text and images from your phone to Evernote. Just launch the app and as you surf web pages, copy any text or images you want to save. You’ll hear a beep, indicating your selection was saved to the Everclip clipboard. Later, just go back to Everclip and send the clips along with any tags you add to your Evernote account. Before I found Everclip, I had a tedious workaround of emailing links to my Evernote account, then revisiting the link later and re-saving the full page’s content. Everclip makes it so much easier to save information from the iPhone!

Cost: $1.99