Tips, Tools and Great Reading – May 9, 2014

photo credit: degreezero2000 via photopin cc

As the purpose of my business is to help small business owners grow their businesses through focused systems for sales and marketing I read dozens (maybe hundreds) of articles, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. every week.  Many of those are about new tools, tricks and tips to make small business life easier and more effective

(the rest are about the Arkansas Razorbacks, Jimmy Buffett or the Arkansas Razorbacks…or at least that’s what it feels like).  

So, I will share some of those occasionally.  Please feel free to share your ideas or other cool tricks in the comments below.

LinkedIn & Evernote
I am a fairly heavy user of the free versions of apps for cloud-based storage and backup (Dropbox), note taking and link library (Evernote) and connection/networking (LinkedIn).  If you aren’t, you should be (and when you figure out how to go totally digital and off of paper, let me know how you did it).  

This morning, as I stared at the ever-growing pile of un-scanned business cards sitting on my desk, I discovered this new functionality connecting LinkedIn and Evernote. There is some great functionality in this that is still in the Free versions of these apps (or at least free for a while) but they may just have cracked the code to getting me to pay for these services.  

Now if I can just figure out how to get those scans uploaded as contacts in my Hatchbuck CRM system.

#AmazonCart & Twitter
I’m a pretty darned loyal Amazon Prime member.  This week Amazon and Twitter announced the ability to add things to your Amazon Cart via Twitter  This just has the look and feel of a very significant change in the already easy online shopping and buying experience.  And it just might make it WAY too easy for me to buy stuff.

Great Duct Tape Reading 

(no, not about duct tape itself, just great content on all things Small Business Marketing)
I believe in owning your bias, so here’s mine – I’m an Authorized Duct Marketing Consultant (see that badge at the top of the page?) so I’m going to post / retweet / share stuff that John Jantsch and the great team at Duct Tape do.  But I do it for the right reasons – there is always great content here that you can read any time that many others will not let you see without paying for their expertise.  So soak up as much as you can, it’ll make you smarter.

John has a new book coming out soon and as he builds a following for it there are lots of Sales tips here

There are also a couple of great guest posts on the Duct Tape blog this week:

Why Live Chat is Powerful: I can speak to this one; I am currently using Zopim with a client and this is a very flexible way to engage with customers and prospects when they are “in your store” (i.e., your website).

5 Steps to Great Email Newsletters:  I am consistently surprised at how off the rails an email newsletter can get, this post straightens that out.

As always, if you’d like to discuss putting a focused, results-driven system for small business marketing into your business (and want some free insight), let’s get started here.