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March 31, 2010
A few days ago over lunch I held an impromptu mastermind session over at our new internet business community Lunchtime Mastermind. After a few minutes of research I landed on Chatroll – one of my new favorite tools. Chatroll allowed me to create a chat room (with tons of great options) and embed it in my website in about 5 minutes – for free.
Why would you want this? You could use it for many things – from covering live events to live Q&A. In our instance we want a way to easily have mastermind sessions with our members.
Chatroll Features:
- Easily embed in any website (including a great WordPress Plugin)
- Customize color and size to match the look and feel of your site
- Moderate with 1-click delete, custom profanity filters and IP block
- Manage read, write and moderate permissions with fine-grained access controls
- And Tons More
One feature we are integrating into our mastermind group now is single sign on. Using this our members will be able to log in to our mastermind chat sessions using their WordPress membership account. Sometimes technology makes it easy 
Do you have questions about Chatroll? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!
Build A Hub Online
February 5, 2010
Every business needs a hub online… Here are four essential pieces in building that hub.
1. You need a good domain
2. You need something you can update easily
3. You need a way to build a list
4. You need to collect data
What’s in your hub? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!
Want to learn more about building a hub online?
Check out our guide to “Getting IT Right”
Use Hootsuite To Create Twitter Widgets
February 1, 2010
Today I stumbled on the widget creation tool in Hootsuite that allows you to create an embeddable widget on your website or blog.
Here is how it works.. Just click the embed button on any column
Then click “Grab Code” and paste it in your sidebar or website!
It’s pretty easy – got any questions? Leave a comment or jump into the forums!
P.S. Hootsuite was Doug’s tool of the week on our internet business podcast
1Shopping Cart Adds iPhone App
January 16, 2010
1ShoppingCart (our e-commerce platform of choice) just released their “Mobile Notifier” iPhone app.
What’s it do?
- Simple, intuitive user interface
- Easy setup with API Key retrieval feature
- Detailed order, product and customer information
- Summarized view of your last seven days of sales
- Supports multiple accounts
- It’s free with your Pro account
Get updates to your phone that your website is working for you. It really is a great feeling1
Increase Your Shareability With The Meebo Bar
December 21, 2009
Today we installed the Meebo Bar WordPress Plugin on this site.
If you look at the screenshot below you’ll see it adds a “bar” along the bottom with several social and sharing functions…
Hovering the “Share Page” button on the bar allows visitors to your site to quickly share the page…
We also setup the ability for visitors to ask us questions when they are on the site. If you are reading something and have a question about it – just ask us! We’ll try to get back to you right away.
We also added the RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon buttons using the easy configuration tool provided by Meebo. The RSS button pulls the latest from our RSS feed. The Twitter button pulls our latest tweets. The Facebook Button shows off our fan page widget. And the StumbleUpon button lets you share it to the SU network.
If you have any questions about the Meebo bar and integrating it into your website, jump into our forums or leave us a comment here.
Free Google Analytics App for iPhone
November 23, 2009
We’ve written about the Google Analytics app for iPhone before called “AnalyticsApp” before that lets us manage our web analytics on the run. However while that iPhone app for Google Analytics cost $$$, this one is free. This app doesn’t include all of the features but it gives you a great executive overview…
Details Include…
Analyze This! is a free app that presents an executive overview of Google Analytics data to directors on the go. It does not show you everything that is available in Google Analytics. Instead it focuses on the measurements that matter—the ones that impact your bottom line.
Interested in monitoring goals, e-commerce, and campaigns, and how they develop daily, weekly, or monthly? Then this app is for you!
Analyze This! is intended for businesspeople who set goals, run campaigns, and track sales. It is not for people who just like to analyze visits, visitors, and page views.
The idea is to present only the key measurements that instantly tell you how your business is doing. There are other apps on the market, but ours is free and easy to use.
Analyze This! A Free Google Analytics App for iPhone
5 Essential Web Strategy Tools
February 2, 2009
Having the right tools in your toolbox is a great way to start a new project. This is the same for your web strategy. Sure you need to learn how to use them – which we’ll get to later. But for now, arm yourself with these killer web tools that will help you begin your web strategy quest.
1. Firefox
Firefox is the ultimate tool for running an internet business. There are dozens of plugins that create the ultimate productivity environment. We’ll cover many of these plugins later, but for now.. just download it and start using it. You won’t regret it.
2. WordPress
WordPress the ultimate platform to run your website and we HIGHLY recommend using it. It’s flexible, scalable, and extremely easy to use. With a vast community of plugins and themes its hard to find a better blog and content management system platform.
3. Google Analytics
You will want Google Analytics installed on your website for many reasons we’ll cover later. For now, just slap it in using the WordPress plugin or embed the code on your website. The analytics data will be used to hone your website for your content marketing and internet marketing strategies.
4. Google Reader
Google Reader is the ultimate tool for information gathering – whether it’s automated research or staying up to date with industry information. Once we’re done with you it will be a tool you use daily for listening, reading, and sharing.
5. Twitter / TweetDeck
Twitter is a multi-purpose tool that allows you to build community, track topics, and have great discussions. We recommend getting a Twitter account, subscribing to some relevant topics, and finding people similar to you. We also recommend TweetDeck to help manage all of this. More on using Twitter for web strategy coming in later posts. And once you signup, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!