Here are a few 3rd party services I know, love, and recommend. At least one or more of our staff has used them personally.

  • Ring Central – Get an 800#, and sound like a million bucks with various extensions, control over your hours of operation, and much more. It’s slick. Setting it up is a little bit of hassle as it is with any phone system, but once you do, it works great and it’s slick. They can help with setup, but I wanted absolute control, so by “hassle” I meant “I had to write the script, then voice it, then upload the wav files”. It works, it’s far cheaper than buying a PBX, and these days, there’s no reason to have a human receptionist. Click here for a risk-free test drive – if you don’t like it, they’ll refund your investment (it’s cheap – like $25/mo for 5-line pro version that we use).
  • Ebay Sniper – Gixen.com. This slick tool will place an ebay bid for you at the last second, helping avoid competitive bidding. Great for snagging business items and personal items alike.
  • Google Services. It’s no secret we’re fans of Google. Here are a few most-recommended services you need to check out:
    • Google Analytics. Fabulous tool, and 100% Free. Need I say more? This will show you who’s using your site, how they’re getting there, and so much more..in short, it’s like a performance dashboard for your website.
    • Google Webmaster Services. This can help with SEO and (God Forbid) spider issues, malware issues, etc.
    • Google Adwords. We have a love/hate relationship here only because you need to pay to be on top, and bidding for anything just goes against our philosophy (which is rank high organicially). That said, PPC is here to stay, and they do a great job with it. If nothing else, you definitely need to use the free keyword analysis tools to determine content for your website – this shows you what humans are searching for.
    • Google Trends. Worth a look..you’ll understand when you see it. Smart SEO webmasters sometimes tie in phrases from google trends into their site, and see a traffic spike by doing so. This takes work, but can definitely pay off big time.
  • Shoeboxed.com – Who wants paper? Tired of having the un-searchable shoebox of receipts and business cards? Just mail ‘em to shoeboxed.com and they’ll scan and recognize them for you, flawlessly. It simply works – great help for tax time and keeping your office paperless, or after a business convention when you have a stack of business cards you need to follow up on.

More to follow…