Sagespider Web Design

We would all like to lower our monthly bills and one way to do it is by getting an “internet phone”. More than half of internet users now have a high speed connection. Using this connection, you can very easily have an internet phone that uses VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) technology. Your older providers like Qwest, Comcast, Verizon, Centel etc have charged you so much per month, $60 or more, and you are up against the wall and they keep raising their prices! Some are now even offering you “digital phone service” themselves. If you currently have a land phone line that services both your phone and your internet, check to see if you can have just data line just for your internet service and drop the “phone service” part of the bill. I did and cut mt bill from $54/month! So check out the available services below to see what is an alternative for you. I have helped my clients as well as myself save monthly on the phone bill.

1. Magicjack. It is CHEAP yep that is the word. Mostly good it has some glitches but you can’t beat the price. $40 the first year and $20 every year after that for all your local and long distance calling in the US.
Pros are you can send this to relatives outside the country and they can call you using their Magicjack for that $20 per year. If you place a call outside the US to a land line, their rates are super low and for $10, I’ve been calling my friend now for two years when they are in France. BTW the calls overseas are super quick and amazingly clearer than a land line with a calling card. Go figure.
Cons… You don’t get to pick your phone number, you can’t port a number (at least not yet) to magicjack and your computer has to be on to make and receive calls. Occasionally it has glitches and is best used plugged into a USB port directly on your computer. There seems to be more problems if you are plugged into a powered hub and that hub can’t have any other power hogs on it like an external drive. Magicjack can now be purchased at Best Buy, Walgreens, Target and other places around town or you can have it sent from the internet at www.magicjack.com. Really the cheapest downright great solution!

2. VOIPO.com This is what I recommend to my business clients. You can even port your old telephone number over to it including your old 800 (toll free) number! It is a great solution for a business. The cost is $18 monthly or if you pay a year at a time $99/year ($136 with taxes and fees) which breaks down to about $8 a month. You do have to have an additional port available on your modem or you have to buy a router to use with your high speed internet modem as this service comes directly off your modem and not your computer. The plus is you don’t have to have your computer on to use your phone. You will be sent a linksys telephone adapter to use with your phone. Most businesses like this as they already have a phone number established and therefore don’t have to change their number much less their stationary or business cards with phone numbers. Now an additional feature with VOIPO.com is that if you have a business hosting account with hostgator.com ($14.95/month to host multiple domains with free SSL license) you also get a free 800 (toll free number) with Voipo.com. Great phone setup for your business! See www.voipo.com

3. There are several others… Vonnage with their world coverage now for $24.95/ month. Skype has stepped up to the plate to add similar features like voipo.com. So I would also check both of these out as well.

Like all internet phones though faxing is a hit or miss event. Most if not all internet phones do not provide faxing or are not equipped to fax. You can try it with your internet phone by lowering the baud rate on your fax machine and a few other tweeks but internet phones were not built to fax as it is a different technology. Though in this day and age that is what scanning and emailing is for. Some things you can still fax by using electronic faxing services.

So if you want to cut those monthly phone bills at least by half if not more read up on these solutions and give it a shot! Keep more of your money and spend it on something you really need it for.

EASY Photo Resizing

Technical Tizzie blog under www.wisdomwoman.com

The subject of photo resolution and sizing is probably one of the most confusing subjects in computer graphics, and if you don’t think it is, you probably don’t really know very much about it.

When we are talking about printed images, the subject is still complicated and needs careful consideration.

However, most of us, most of the time, are using our images on the web, where there is just one useful resolution – screen resolution of 72ppi, and our major concern is the dimensional size of the photo – since many of them come from the cameras at billboard size.

For this resizing, there are some very simple, online solutions and this is one of my favorites – a website called ShrinkPictures.com

The interface is elegant in its simplicity:

1. You click “Choose File” to go to your computer to choose the photo you want to resize.

2. Choose your desired width in pixels. 800 pixels wide is usually the absolute maximum you would want, and 400-600 is better for most uses.

3. You could make the photo B&W or Sepia if you wanted to for some reason.

4. Choose a quality.

5. Click the Resize red button.

Some buzzing and whirring occurs and you are presented with your resized photo.

You can Right-Click on it to Save it back to your computer with a new name or just hit the provided Download link, in which case it is saved to your computer with one of those numeric gobble-de-goop names.

You can then delete the online version – or it will be automatically deleted after 2 hours.

I love this site. It should remove a lot of resizing angst for everyone working with online images.
Check out this wisdomwoman.com post

Seven Steps to Understanding Online Advertising
Story by AmandaDailyWorth on Etsy.com
Published on February 3, 2010

This guest post is by Amanda Steinberg, founder of DailyWorth.com. DailyWorth is a daily email about money for women — delivering practical tips, empowering ideas and the occasional kick in the pants.

You’ve started your business. You’re selling the cutest organically sourced, hand-crafted baby teethers on earth. Your shop is launched, your blog has a few comments, the teethers are good to go and the supplies are stocked. So where are the sales?

Here’s a gruesome reality to business that’s learned only through experience: Nothing sells without a lot of pavement pounding. To really sell, you have to master all aspects of marketing — and that could include some form of paid advertising.

Fortunately, in today’s world of websites, blogs and e-newsletters, you have plenty of inexpensive advertising options to test. For example, you can post an ad banner on MomMadeThat.com for as little as $1 a month! Online advertising is, in many ways, brilliant. Unlike print ads, you can measure an immediate response to your efforts. Equally useful, you can target your exact and ideal niche of customers; assuming you know who your ideal customers are, you can likely find blogs and email newsletters that already communicate with them.

I sell an electronic product: a daily newsletter about finance for women called DailyWorth. I’m currently spending upward of $1,000 a month to market it. It makes sense to me because I can earn four-times that through various revenue streams, and far more down the road (I pray!). Having paid for and evaluated the returns on more than fifteen advertising spots in the past year, here’s my advice to you:

Step 1: Establish a budget. Not sure what to spend? It’s not uncommon for businesses to spend 10% of revenue on marketing and advertising. So, if your business is earning $2,000 a month, begin by allocating $200 to online advertising. Keep in mind that you may not see a return on this investment. Ad spending is risky. You may have to buy multiple ads before you find a venue that works for your product. If your product doesn’t have the market appeal you think it does, you may never see a return. Ad spending does not equal sales.

Step 2: Define your best customer. This is the Internet. Many of the websites we visit regularly and subscribe to already have a general sense of who we are (thanks to polls and surveys, and an emerging field called “behavioral targeting.” BT is not creepy — it just means that city dwellers will likely be served ads for Murphy beds, instead of, say, tractors). You, as an ad buyer, need to use this data and only spend money buying ads on websites that reach people you know will want to buy your product. So who is your ideal customer? Perhaps she’s between 28-36 years old, married, living outside of a major metropolitan area and likes chocolate. Or, maybe she’s 50-plus, has grown children, loves yoga and has lots of disposable income. We like buyers with disposable income.

Step 3: Make a list of 10 websites that cater to your ideal customer. Contact the owners of these websites. First, pitch a “guest blog post” (you give them content for free, and in return they link to your Etsy shop or blog). If they say no, consider buying an ad and ask for their “media kit.” This is generally a PDF or link to a list of advertising options and associated rates. Not sure where to begin? ScoutieGirl.com and ModishBlog.com are popular advertising venues for Etsy sellers.

Step 4: Collect and evaluate your options. Here are the two things to understand when buying ads:

* Text or banner, or both? Some websites/blogs/e-newsletters offer banner or graphic ads. You need to be Photoshop-savvy and have the ability to create compelling Photoshop ads to make use of them. They’ll ask you for specific dimensions in pixels (like 125×125), and you’ll need to know what they’re talking about. Other websites/blogs/e-newsletters offer text ads. Text ads are great because they’re easy to produce, can be read on a BlackBerry, and look like editorial. Don’t dismiss text ads even if you’re selling something visual — with the right ad copy, text ads could work for you.
* CPM: CPM means “cost per thousand.” Some advertisers set rates based on the number (in thousands) of impressions their website gets every month; in the case of e-newsletters, it’s based on the number of email addresses they send emails to regularly. How does that translate to your potential cost(s)? A website that gets 8,000 impressions per month might charge you $40 x 8 CPM (where that 8 CPM = 8,000 impressions), or $320 per month. Websites with dozens of banner spots will charge a much lower CPM or flat rate, but remember that you’re also competing with the 10 other banners so you’re vying for a limited pool of click-throughs.

Step 5: Design entertaining ads. Research what makes banner and text ads successful and why people click. If your ad under-performs, it could very well be because it’s boring. I sell advertising on DailyWorth, and I watch closely which ads attract clicks and which don’t. Your banner creative and copy have an enormous impact on performance. In a recent discussion I had with a business owner who buys ads from me, Nellie Akalp, CEO of CorpNet.com (online incorporation services), she said that, “In today’s crowded marketplace, sometimes launching an ad banner isn’t enough. Think about forming relationships with an ad venue’s readers over time and find ways to engage them.” Experiment with contests, giveaways, and sales. Collect fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. In other words, use ads not only to drive sales, but also to build a platform of new virtual acquaintances that you can engage in the future.

Step 6: Deploy your ads. Popular websites can be “sold out of ad space” for months, so don’t procrastinate. It may take a few weeks or even months to see your ads roll out.

Step 7: Measure, refine, and repeat. For the ambitious, mogul-inspired sellers among us, here’s an advanced tip: After you’ve bought multiple ads, monitored performance, and acquired new sales — formulate your “cost per new customer.”

Cost per new customer = how much you spent ÷ number of new customers you acquired

So, if you spent $100 on ads and got two new customers, that’s $50 to acquire a new customer. I hope you’re developing practices to sell new products to existing customers (have a newsletter sign up page on your blog, for example), as it’s much easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. Your cost to acquire a new customer is a critical financial element in understanding how your business grows and reaches profitability, as you develop your advertising budget (or “ad spend” as some call it) and understand what it will really take to reach your sales goals. Renew ads with venues that perform. Consider tweaking your ad creative or don’t return to venues that don’t perform.

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Now this is a great start for your advertising of your products or services. If you haven’t visited www.etsy.com, you should as it has lots of great info even if you aren’t selling a product. Just remember it is geared to the artist. Check this link out as well for more articles and information. Etsy-Advertising-Seller-Handbook.