I have been using Tungle for appointment and meeting scheduling.  Tungle integrates with my Outlook calendar and people who want to schedule a meeting with me can go to my Tungle.me page and easily set up a day and time.

Tungle has gotten even better!  Now for those of us who use WordPress or Typepad for our website platform, you can download the Tungle Plugin and have it easily integrate with our website or blog.

This new Plugin from Tungle makes scheduling of meetings fast and easy.  Download yours and start scheduling today!

Tungle Plugin

If you liked, “Easy Meeting Scheduling with New WordPress Plugin” please share it with your friends by clicking the icons below.

So you built your blog or website through your self-hosted WordPress platform.  You’ve paid a designer to make it look great, to optimize it to be found in the top of the search engines, and you have got some great blog posts out there for your visitors to enjoy.  But have you thought about what would happen if you lost it all?  OMG!

There’s no need to fear – BackupBuddy Plugin is here!
(I sound like Mighty Mouse, for those of you old enough to remember Mighty Mouse) 

According to my WordPress guru, this is the only backup plugin available that will totally backup everything on your WordPress site.  There are several options to choose from depending upon how many sites you need to back up.  But well worth the money, especially if you are using WordPress as your website, like I do.  Click the link above to check it out and get your BackupBuddy Plugin* now before you need it!

*affiliate link

If you liked, “Awesome Plugin to Backup your Entire WordPress Site” please consider sharing with your friends by clicking the links below.  Thanks!

Getting people to your page is just the first part of having a successful and profitable site. Making them stay there, is another matter. Website statistics just isn’t about driving traffic to your site, but it’s about making people want to stay there and come back over and over again. Bounce rates, which is defined as the percentage of visitors to any given site who arrive at a page and quickly leave before looking at any other page. Therefore, the lower the bounce rate of a site, the better.

So how does one keep visitors from ‘bouncing’ away? Here are a few simple tricks to keep your audience riveted to your website.

Optimize your site

No one likes to be kept waiting, least of all people who can leave your site at the click of a button. A site that loads quickly and pulls up all the information anyone and everyone may need will make it easier for visitors to poke around your website.

Clear and Intuitive Navigation

There’s nothing worse than arriving in a new city and not know where north, south, east and west are. Think of your website as a new place for visitors to explore – make sure the roads are well planned, and road signs clear and concise. A visible navigation bar, labeled accordingly and no broken links are essential to keeping visitors to your site.

Have relevant content

According to a recent study by BBC News, an average Internet user spends less than a minute per website. How can you keep people longer than that? By giving them what they need, of course, through relevant content. If you run a website about fashion, then make sure from the homepage that your design and content reflects this.

Keep content fresh and updated

A soap opera writer once said “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry and make ‘em wait.” The same could be applied to your content – keep people interested and coming back for more. Having something new each day (or even every few hours) will keep people on your pages.

Have all the tools available

Web 2.0 is all about interactivity and socializing. Many blogs and sites make it easy to share links and content to their own social networking profile and interact with other users. You can install some simple tools directly on your website. Skysa, for example, installs a non-intrusive navigation bar on your site that lets visitors quickly access sites like Facebook and Twitter right on your site, without directing them away. (see mine below)

By making these few simple changes, you’ll see less visitors bouncing and more people sticking around your website.

I found this great short video on how to get indexed faster on Goggle.  (Thanks to my friend Nick Stewart from Nick’s Traffic Tricks for the link)

If you liked “Get Indexed Faster on Google” please share it by clicking the links below or to the right.

We all struggle with keeping our website and blog visitors on our sites.  If you use Google Analytics, like I do,  the Bounce Rates could really use some improvement!  But I just recently found a easy and free way to keep visitors on my site and it’s called Skysa!

Do you see the floating bar at the bottom of my blog; that’s my Skysa Bar.  And it is fully customizable.  I have added my social media links, an RSS ticker that reflects my last few blog post titles, an events area, comments, a share button and more.

There’s many reasons to use Skysa with your website. You can add or improve social features, engage your website visitors, collect valuable member information, and more.  Skysa is designed to help websites keep visitors longer, and build more traffic through socially engaging Apps.  Once you add Skysa to your website you never have to update the code to get new features or updates.  You can easily change the look and features of your Skysa Bar from your dashboard on Skysa.

Keep those visitors on your website and blog longer by engaging them in additional features and content – Add your Skysa Bar today!  I love mine.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your online friends and contacts by clicking the buttons below or to the right.  Thanks!

What is “data” in our lives today? Its documents from work, tax returns from last year, credit card statements with sensitive data, pictures from the summer vacation, rare MP3s you have collected, home videos i.e. our memories, identity, and assets. All these are our “data”, electronically stored in our desktops, laptops, PDAs, Servers and at the mercy of software and hardware glitches that can wipe out everything in a second. Do you have insurance on your data?

Most people don’t give data backup much thought until they actually lose everything to some technical failure. Unfortunately, no matter how much you think you can avoid it, the truth is that your laptops, desktops or servers are all machines and they will wear down one day. Even if your hard drive does not fail and motherboard does not short out, you can still have erased all your data by pressing the wrong key or downloading corrupt files into your computer by mistake. Worst of it is, even with expensive hardware and careful maintenance it only takes a power surge to fry your computer.

Apart from hardware failure, corrupt software and virus attacks are the most common causes for data loss. Unfortunately, the most common forms of data backup like USB drives, external hard drives and DVD/CDs are just as vulnerable. USB drives and external hard drives can become corrupt while CD/DVDs tend to get scratches that make then unplayable. Therefore, if you think you have fool proof backup in these— think again.

We don’t realize the cost of not taking backups until we lose the data we had so carefully stored in our hard drives. It is similar to losing your home to a fire or a natural disaster. You suddenly find that you have lost names, addresses, phone numbers, letters, and photos – things that are important and precious to you. But thankfully most people have insurance for their home and belongings.

Data backup is even more important for people who work from home. These days home based businesses are a rage and the accounts, tenders, agreements, vouchers – everything is probably stored in a system at your home and you take regular backup in an external hard drive. All it will take is a power surge or glitch during the backup process to corrupt the data on both your computer and external hard drive at the same time and you could lose everything pertaining to your business transactions in the blink of an eye.

The one and only way to avoid these mistakes is to keep your files backed up with a third party provider like Carbonite. For a fee of $54.95/ year, Carbonite can store unlimited data in its secure servers, with encryption for double security. Even if your computer crashes, you can login from any another computer to access all your data instantly. Make a smart decision, get some data insurance and back it up with Carbonite now to crash proof your life!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and finding that right image can sometimes be crucial. Whether you’re illustrating a book or reporting on a breaking news event, capturing the essence of written words in one picture can be difficult. It’s easy enough to go to Google and type in what you need, but just because you find something on Google Images, doesn’t mean you can use it. Google pulls photos from various websites, and many of these photos are copyrighted and belong to someone else, who may not appreciate you taking their photos and “borrowing” them for your blog. Since not everyone has access to a professional photographer and a studio, does this mean you can’t have photos on your site at all? Of course not, as there are many options for bloggers and webmasters to acquire images for their sites.

Free

The best things in life are free, right? Perhaps. There are sites out there like MorgueFile.com, that provides images (some from professional photographers) for free. Public domain images are another source for free photos. These images are basically pictures whose copyrights have lapsed or expired, because their original owners have not opted to renew their licenses. Keep in mind that, unless the author specified that his or her work is “public domain”, in the United States, copyrights can remain in effect for up to 120 years.

Other options are works published under the Creative Commons (CC) License. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization created specifically for artists to be able to share their works with others for free, without the need for lawyers and legal documents. Depending on the terms of the licenses, a work can be used for various purposes. The most liberal licenses allow you to modify and distribute their photos for any purpose, but most will ask for the very least: a) attribution (giving credit to the original artist) and/or b) non-commercial use (you can’t make money off the image.) While this may seem like a good idea, if your website makes money or if you have Adsense on your blog, you may not be able to use images with CC licenses.

Commercial/Paid

If you’re planning to have a very specialized, high-end website that will make you thousands of dollars a month, then there’s no need to skimp on photography! Many artists and photographers sell their images (or their services) for a fee, and you can be guaranteed you’ll have a one-of-a-kind picture.

However, for most people this may not be the case. There are websites out there that own images (or allow people to sell their images) at affordable prices. Royalty-free images are the most common among these and can be quite inexpensive. When you purchase royalty-free images, you can use it for an unlimited amount of time, make as many copies as you need (and as often as you want) and the images can be distributed all over the world. Best of all, the images can be suitable for all mediums – whether you need high-resolution billboard photos or small, web-safe graphics.

One such website is Fotolia, where they offer royalty-free images for as little as $0.75 per image! There are millions of pictures available today, so head over to Fotolia now and find that perfect image!

Related articles by Zemanta

• 15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online (sixrevisions.com)
• Find Quality Free Images with Sprixi (techstartups.com)
• Fotolia Plugs Into Office 2007 Apps – Buy Stock Photos Straight From MS Word (techcrunch.com)
• Fotolia Lets You Animate Photos With Flixtime (techcrunch.com)

Have you heard the phrase keyword rich content or content rich blogs?

It’s funny how one thing on the Internet leads you to something else and then something else.  Yesterday, I received an email from my favorite platform for managing social media sites, HootSuite, about some awesome upgrades they just launched.  And as all good little online business owners should do, I posted a comment on their blog.  Then I saw a small little icon that said “reblog.”  Of course, I know what re-tweet is but didn’t know about the “reblogging.”

I clicked the icon and found that through that quick link, I could re-post or “reblog”  their information directly to my blog…without re-typing it!!!  Now that’s some kind of technology!  (you can check out yesterday’s post “reBlog from HootSuite …”)  I didn’t type any of that!  Sweet!

Image via CrunchBase

The program that allowed me to make this magic happen is called Zemanta. And the features this free browser add-on offers is way too cool.  As I’m writing this post now, Zemanta is looking up links, photos and reference material for this post.  All I have to do is click the links in the sidebar of my blog dashboard and I have filled my blog post with rich content for my readers, including links and photos. (notice the little “reblog” icon at the end of this post.  Click it for me!!)

Needless to say, I am a very happy blogger today with the treasure that I just found through Zemanta.  Oh and did I mention it will also recommend keywords for you?  Go grab your version of Zemanta and make your blog posts content rich with just the click of your mouse!

And let me know what you think of the platform…I’m lovin’ it!

For a limited time (until February 15th, 2010) you can get free online data backup from Backupify.  What does that mean??  It means you can back up your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs and much more.  And for the next few days, you can do that for free.

Backupify is an online data backup service that allows you to back up the majority of your online content automatically.  With Backupify you have the ability to store your online information where YOU can get access to it.

Just follow this link, Backupify to get your free online data backup account today!  Even if you read this post after the 15th, it’s still a great investment in your online data protection.

I found a great resource for converting PDF files to Word documents.  And you can get the free download today (Jan. 26, 2010) only.

Here is the link PDF Converter

You can also visit my Facebook Fan Page, become a Fan and then look under the “Free For You” tab for other great online resources to help build your business presence.  There are new resources each day!

If you liked this post, click the links below and share it with your friends or Tweet It!