I stumbled across this article from Freestone.com entitled “Top 5 Automation Tools for Your Online Solo Service Business”. I have never tried any of these services, but must admit I am intrigued and will check them out. Check out the full article for more details. I summarize below.
1. 1ShoppingCart – shopping cart, autoresponder, broadcast/newsletter, and database management systems all rolled into ONE system. (But to get the all-in-one, you need to pay for the “Pro” level which is currently $99/month)
2. TimeDriver – an online service whereby your clients can self-schedule their appointments with you, avoiding the back and forth of emails that happens when you’re trying to arrangement appointments and, of course, the time spent doing this. It works with both Outlook and Google calendars.
3. Submit Your Article – an article submission service that submits your articles to hundreds of different article directories and ezine publishers on your behalf.
4. BYOAudio – A service to record and host your podcasts, as well as automatically share it with all the various podcast directories, including iTunes.
5. OnlyWire – create social bookmarks for blog entries. In other words, when you publish a blog post it automatically notifies Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon, with a link to your post.
Flickr is a really great service for storing and sharing your photos online. It also works GREAT for any photos you want to display on your blog. I love WordPress, but I find that its handling of images is a bit clunky and hard to use. It is MUCH easier to upload photos in Flickr, and then to actually create the blog post in Flickr.
Also, if you use Flickr to host your blog photos, you will find it MUCH easier to move your blog to a different domain or blog host in the future. Otherwise, moving blogs or domains can be a big pain if you have a lot of images.
There is a trick, though, to getting Flickr to work with your self-hosted WordPress blog.
How to use Flickr with your WordPress Blog:
Create Flickr account
Set up the link between your Flickr account and your blog. Flickr –> You tab (on Flickr main menu) –> Your Account –> Extending Flickr –> Your blogs –> Configure your Flickr-to-blog setting –> “Set up your blog”
From the drop-down, select the type of blog you have. If you have a WordPress blog that is self-hosted/installed or on WordPress.com, select “WordPress Blog”
On the next screen, enter the login details for your WordPress account:
API Endpoint: http://<YOUR.BLOG.ADDRESS.COM>/xmlrpc.php (obviously replace <YOUR.BLOG.ADDRESS.COM> with your blog’s address.
Login: the login name that you use to login to your WordPress blog to create posts. This might be a different login name than the “admin” account you use to configure WordPress.
Password: self-explanatory, no?
Then the NEXT button.
If you get a “The username and password you entered were not valid.” message, then you have to do some configuration in WordPress. Open a NEW web browser window (leave Flickr open in another window).
Login to your WordPress admin console: http://<YOUR.BLOG.ADDRESS.COM>/wp-admin
Settings –> Writing –> Remote Publishing
Under XML-RPC, check the box for “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing”
Click “Save Changes”
In your web browser, switch back to the Flickr “add a weblog” window and try submitting again.
In Flickr, a “Confirm your details” screen appears. Make any necessary corrections and make sure the “store your password” box is checked. Then click the “All Done” button.
NOW, select a photo that you want to put on your blog:
In Flickr, select the photo.
When the photo displays by itself in Flickr, along the top margin of the photo there are several icons. Click on the “Blog This”
From the drop-down list, select the name of your blog.
A “create blog entry” screen appears in Flickr. Enter a title for the post and the content. Note that you will not be able to do much fancy formatting here. If you want that, you can do it later by logging into WordPress and editing the blog post.
Click “Post This”.
Visit your blog. You should see a new post that displays your photo from Flickr.
When most people start with Twitter, they get really focused on the number of followers they have. Makes sense, right? You want your message to reach as many people as possible, and followers are people who are saying they want to listen to you…
But take it from me, this is NOT what you should focus on. Instead you need to focus on QUALITY of followers – you need followers that are actually going to read your tweets, that are genuinely intersted in what you have to say, and might ultimately buy from you or refer you to other buyers.
It is EASY to get tens of thousands of low-quality followers on Twitter.
Why (how)?
Well, a lot of Twitter people automatically follow anyone who follows them (they use tools to automate this). So, if you follow 1000 of these people, you’ll instantly gain 1000 followers. You can even pay a service to do this for you – they keep a list of Twitterers who are known auto-followers, and when you purchase the services use your Twitter profile to automatically follow all these people. You can become an auto-follower yourself, which will result in even more people following you, and then you get more followers for yourself, …. you get the idea.
So, voila! within a few days you’d have 10,000 followers.
Thing is, these followers are “low quality.” Anyone who automatically follows anyone who follows them is NOT READING your tweets. And anyone who is following more than 500 people is NOT reading your tweets.
So, great. You have 10,000 followers who don’t read your tweets.
And what’s worse is you don’t want to read any of their tweets either (remember, you’re following all 10,000 of them in return!). They’re all out there tweeting about weight loss plans, viagra, “make money fast” schemes, “how to get 100,000 followers on Twitter” schemes (which I already detailed above!), their radical political and religious views, etc.
So, while there might be people that you REALLY do want to follow – thought leaders in your field, people who always post interesting things — well, you can’t even find their tweets because you are constantly inundated by nonsense tweets from all those low-quality followers.
Instead of worrying about your number of followers and participating in one of these crazy auto-follow schemes, be judicious about who you follow on Twitter.
1) Follow people because you are interested in what they have to say. Strike up Twitter-sations with these folks via “replies” and “retweets”. They might follow you in return if you tweet about things they find you interesting. And then they might retweet your content to their broader audience of genuinely interested followers.
2) Do not follow anyone just because they followed you. This used to be considered “good manners” when Twitter was in its infancy, but now it is just insane. Look up who this person it – if they post things you are interested in or are in your field, follow away! But if they post about current events in Kentucky (assuming you don’t live there!), gossip about The Hills, and Twitter money making schemes, stay away. You don’t have to block them from following you, but don’t follow back.
Be VERY cautious about following anyone who has tens of thousands of followers and follows tens of thousands. This is a sure sign of an auto follower. And tweets from auto-follower people tend to be quite spammy and self-promotional (although not always – use your judgment).