Young Entrepreneur Tools: Email and Instant Messaging
It’s been a long time since I wrote the articles on Paypal and Domain Names and Hosting, so I thought I’d keep on going with the series and write about probably the most used tool that I visit everyday, and which I couldn’t do without. Please note that I had nearly finished writing this article yesterday, but I pressed a key and BOOM – it was all gone! So after the initial frustration I have decided to give it another go!
Email and Instant Messaging are 2 things which have enabled me to be where I am today. Today, nearly everyone has an email account and the ease of sending an electronic piece of mail which is free and which is quick and instantaneous beats the telephone hands down. Let’s firstly get a Wikipedia definition to get the exact meaning of the phenomena which is Email:
“Electronic mail (abbreviated “e-mail” or, more commonly, “email”) is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term “e-mail” (as a noun or verb) applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other.”
The growth of sending virtual mail has been astronomical. It was only in 1982 that the first emailing system was used in the Whitehouse, however this was only open for a select few employees. Since then, email account have been opening left, right and centre (although this has unfortunately meant a larger amount of spam and spoof emails appearing in our Inboxes). And did you know that in 2009 we are projected to be sending and receiving 160 emails per day each!
So How Do I Start Using Email?
Using Email has never been easier. There are now so many companies offering free email accounts and a specific amount of storage, that it can be hard to seperate them from each other. There are however, 3 big online email providers:
WordPress Plugin for Automatic Post Saving?
Following the frustration of deleting an extremely long article just before I was going to publish it I went on the rampage to find a plugin that automatically saves posts, very much like the Gmail feature from Google. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a plugin that did what I wanted to. Does anyone have a link to where I could find a post autosave feature or plugin?
On a side note, I was browsing through the WordPress Support Forums and apparently, WordPress does automatically save posts every minute. Therefore if your browser crashes, all you have to do is click on “Manage > Your Post Title” and it will come up with the saved version. So why didn’t this work for me?
Reaping The Rewards After Working Hard
October 17, 2006 by Adam
Filed under Entrepreneurship, Me & My Life
I posted 2 months ago about my success in my GCSE Examinations – I managed to clock up 10 A*s which I was ecstatic about. At the time I received a lot of “Congratulations” and “Well Done”s, but the icing on the cake really came yesterday in the post. At the moment Im on half-term holiday, and in the morning I woke up to find a letter written by my school, addressed to myself.
In the envelope was a letter and a small booklet. I read the letter and to my surprise found that I had won the “GCSE All Round Prize“. In the small booklet were 2 x £10 National Book Tokens to spend in any book shop nationwide (on a side note, why don’t schools ever give cold, hard cash?!) I was really pleased and thankful to the school.
I think that this gesture of giving prizes is really quite clever – especially by schools. It encourages the pupils to work hard during the day and if they do, the prize offers to put them in front of the eyes of many parents who would come along to watch the prize-giving, and it also gives the kids a chance to spend money on books that they otherwise would have “wasted” on CD’s, clothes, video games and a lot of other non-orthodox stuff 
The feeling of euphoria I felt when I received my results was huge, especially as I had been working for 3 years at school just for that moment. I think the same in general can be applied to business. You can feel that you’re struggling everyday trying to make ends meet, but when you finally get a breakthrough – a new contract, a bigger paycheck – the sense of relief and pride can be enormous. And it’s this feeling inside along with the more physical aspects of success, that drives all of us along in our quests to be successful entrepreneurs.
So the next time you’re finding it difficult to keep on top of a growing amass of projects, or a heavier workload, take comfort in knowing that somewhere along the line, you’re going to be able to “reap the rewards” of your hard work – and use that as a goal to narrow your focus. Finally, Im not sure which books to buy – I want something that will help me with my entrepreneurial lifestyle – anyone have any recommendations?
Business Loyalty is a Mind Game
October 14, 2006 by Adam
Filed under Business, Personal Development
This morning I received a very interesting email from one of this blog’s readers by a person named Syia who has her own blog at Syia.biz. I have been communicating with her for a week now, and she promised that she would write a guest post for me. While I didn’t think the post itself was suitable for a stand-alone article, I wanted to comment on some of the theories she described,
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“I just got my supplementary Diners Club card 2 months ago and now I have 1 big problem that is I keep only wanting to go shopping at places that accept Diners Club Card only. Why is this happening to me? Well one thing for sure because my dad will pay up the bill for my Diners Club card charge but what is the interesting part is I just want to go to places that ACCEPT Diners Club card.”
Syia, goes onto explain how she thinks that it’s a mind game – how we all have favourites which in reality make no sense at all. My maths teacher yesterday was saying that when you go to University (like Oxford) you feel an instant sense of longing for the first “College” you walk into. He said that you’ve already formed a trust / a bond with that College and so you are determined to stay there for your first year of University. It’s a totally irrational choice, but it shows the power of loyalty.
Syia concludes with how getting loyal followers to your business or blog is exactly the same. Try and focus on techniques, images, brands that will make visitors automatically associate themselves with you. Emotions are regularly used in marketing (check out this Emotional Advert I found for HallMark) as they bind with the viewer and bond with them.
How can you produce loyalty? That’s something I don’t have the question to, and something you will have to figure out through continuous testing if you’re to get the perfect loyal gathering to your business or blog.
Freshly Squeezed Blog Juice Anyone?
Whilst talking to Patrick Gavin (owner of TLA) yesterday, he mentioned a cool little tool which his company had just released for all publishers and indeed for all bloggers in the blogosphere. It’s called the Blog Juice Calculator and it basically calculates the popularity of your blog compared to other major weblogs in your niche field.
As you can see, Blogtrepreneur has an indexed Juice of 4.1 which (by talking to other bloggers) seems to be a standard, especially amongst the minor blogs. Of course, sites such as Problogger and Entrepreneurs-Journey measure higher up the scale. This is because the TLA tool measures the amount of Bloglines subscribers your blog feed has, its Alexa Rank, its Technorati Rank and the number of Technorati Backlinks; therefore giving a much rounder picture.
While I was messing around a few hours ago, there was a field which let you compare your blog to another, but this seems to be missing – maybe Patrick has taken that particular part down, Im not sure. Also Im pretty sure I do have Bloglines subscribers, but the Blog Juicer doesn’t seem to think so – so take these rankings with a pinch of salt.
However all in all, Im really impressed with TLA’s creativeness and I hope they continue to innovate and push forward. Anyone want to share their Blog’s Juice?
