Month: July 2005

Email Processing Tips

July 29, 2005 /

Email is my main productivity tool. When you receive several hundred emails a day, processing these incoming messages quickly becomes a mission critical task! Being an advocate of Getting Thing Done, I’ve come to use the following techniques to process email.

1) Use Today, Later, Home, and Waiting For Categories

inbox_categories.jpg

I make extensive use of Categories to classify and sort email. My Inbox Categories:

Incoming Email (no category)

When an email comes in by default it either has no category and the text is ‘Black’. When I see these emails I know that I have not processed these emails yet, and they need attention.

Today

When I scan the email and decide that the email must be responded to or acted on Today, I set its category to Today. It has its own special color. In Entourage (Microsoft’s Mac Outlook-like Email Client) I set up a script so that simply hitting Ctrl-T sets the selected emails to this category.

Later

If the email requires action on my part, but the email can wait till tomorrow or later, I set its category to Later. Later emails can wait till a future date, but as time permits I might address them today. It has its own special color and Ctrl-L sets the selected emails to this category.

Home

If the email is something I want to respond to when I get home that evening, or if it’s an email I need to show or review with someone in my family, I set its category toHome. It has its own special color and Ctrl-H sets the selected emails to this category.

Waiting For

If I respond to an email but I need to get a response, or if it’s simply an email in a thread I need to ‘watch’ and see through the topic till resolution, I set its category toWaiting For. It has its own special color and Ctrl-W sets the selected emails to this category.

2) Managing Your Inbox — The Daily Review

Every morning I sort my email into the above categories. I read the Later emails and may flag some of them as Today. I read the Waiting For emails and if necessary send out a reminder to those from whom I need a reply. Then over the course of the day as emails come in I process emails into the appropriate categories.

3) Project Folders

Sometimes multiple emails on the same topic start to fill up my inbox. Rather than store dozens or hundreds of emails clutter my inbox, I create a project folder. I have a main Project folder, and underneath it create a subfolder for any multi-email project or topic. I put emails in this project folder, and ones that are archived I flag asDone (Ctrl-D). I have a note on my separately maintained ‘Goals’ document (a daily tasks master list) and have a note to work on that project, then go to the project folder at some point in the day to deal with the multiple emails that I have collected on the topic. The Done category helps me separate archived emails from active emails that need attention.

project_categories.jpg
4) Remember the Two Minute Rule

An important Getting Things Done principle is any task that you run across that takes two minutes or less is done immediately. So when you read emails that fill this description, deal with them at once. Otherwise you’ll scan the email multiple times a day, and a 1.5 minute email response ends up take 4 minutes of your day. With dozens of emails being processed inefficiently, those lost seconds add up!

 

Blogs and Search Engines

July 28, 2005 /

Blogs are the latest rage. The 'blogosphere' is almost a separate universe from the older search engine world. How can a blog drive traffic to your web site?

Post Compelling Content Frequently
Post a minimum of 3 articles a week or people won't keep coming to your site. The content must be good, relevant, and free of too much commercial 'buy my stuff' pitch. 5 times or more a week is even better.

Target Niche Groups
Less is more. Having a generic blog on 'Writing' will yield less traffic than having a very niche blog on 'Christian Fiction Writing' or 'How To Get Young Adult Fiction Published.'

Use Pictures
As with newspapers, seven times more people will read the article if it has a picture. Get a good blog tool that let's you upload photos easily and illustrate your articles.

'Ping' Your Posts
'Pinging' is the process of alerting the specialty blog search engines that you have just posted an article on your blog. Simply visit http://pingomatic.com and this tool will ping multiple blog search engines for you. As google.com and others spider the blog search engines, this will help the world find your content.

Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
Use a blog tool that let's you have keyword descriptions in the URLs. Note that this post URL for example is http://stanshinn.com/marketing/blogs-and-search-engines. Using categories in the URL will also help your ranking.

Get Listed in Blogrolls
Blogrolls are the list of favorite web sites often shown in the sidebar of personal blogs. Email a bunch of blogs authors that might be interested in your site and suggest you exchange links with each other.

Post to Discussion Groups
Ready to launch a new blog? Post 3 to 5 compelling articles, then go over to a few of your favorite discussion groups and post articles there mentioning your blog in conjunction with some compelling content that you post on the forum. This is the equivalent of starting a snowball rolling down the hill.

Remember, keep posting great content, and over a few months your readership and web traffic will grow!

Search Engine Optimization Tips

July 28, 2005 /

Back in 1999, to get ranked in the search engines you'd need to go to each search engine directory, register your web site, and then optimize your metatags on your web page. Now that advice is no longer relevant. Most major search engines completely ignore the metatags of your page. Search engines 'crawl' the web and getting registered is as simple as having someone that is known to search engines link to your site. 

Now that the rules have changes, what can you do to improve your search engine ranking?

1) Register your site with DMOZ!
Register your site at dmoz.org, the "open directory" of the Internet, which Google spiders regularly. You have to spend some time inputing information about your business in order to classify your site correctly. This may possibly be the number one thing that Google uses to rank you site: DMOZ's classifications of your site.

2) Relevancy (Having Lots of Links to your Site) Is Key
Now, most search engines rank in searches based on relevancy, meaning mainly that:

  1. You have lot's of sites (which they themselves rank high) linking to your site.
  2. The content in your page matches the search keywords.

So you can have a nice domain name like that above, register it with the search engines, and start out with almost no hits at all. Once you have several other sites linking to your web site, then the traffic starts to pick up.

The relevancy of the site that links to you if really important. If CNN.com links to you once, that can rank you higher than having 50 smaller sites linking to you.

After you do a PPC (pay per click) campaign, your ranking goes up in search engines. Something out there 'notices' your site when you do lot's of PPCs.

3) Domain Name With Keywords Helps You Rank Higher
Having domains with the keywords in them can help you in search engine ranking. For some reason, having dashes in the keywords actually ranks you higher (i.e. doing www.medical-technology-experts.com would rank higher than www.medicaltechnologyexperts.com). See this article for details.

Even without the domain, things like www.mysite.com/23434322/medical-technology-experts  (where the keyword is later in the URL) can help you rank too.

4) Press releases, Articles, and Syndicated Content
Having press releases (that are published on other sites) or articles published on other sites that link back to your site is a great way to increase your ranking. Post press releases and get great coverage and distribution for free at http://prweb.com/.

5) Write A Blog
Blogs are the new, great way to do this, if you have time to write compelling content. More on this in a separate post later.

6) Be Realistic And Patient
Only about 7% of most sites’ traffic (even the most successful ones!) comes from free search engines listings -- the rest comes from referral URLs from articles, reviews, word of mouth, pay-per-clicks, banner ads, direct link (since they heard about it via an email, direct mail, phone call, etc.). So search engine optimization should only be a small component of your overall marketing strategy. But 7% is 7%!

Be patient: seeing your ranking go up  in the search engines can take months. It can take a month to six weeks after you perform the above items to see any impact in showing up in search engines.

Fix Roaming SMTP Issue

July 26, 2005 /

Laptop users are increasingly having an issues due to ISPs disallowing SMTP servers besides the one they provide for security purposes. So laptop users end up needing to reconfigure their email settings every they switch networks. What a pain!

Here are some potential software solutions:

1) Use local (laptop based) SMTP software:

Free SMTP Server is a SMTP server program for Windows that lets you send email messages directly from your computer. If this works this will be the quickest fix to the laptop issue. http://www.softstack.com/freesmtp.html

Here is a commercial tool ($49) as alternative: http://www.getfreefile.com/localsrv.html

2) Use software to switch SMTP servers based on your current location:

Autoroute SMTP (ARS) is designed for automatic switching between SMTP servers depending on what network you are currently working in. http://www.mailutilities.com/ars/

Also, here is a list of other SMTP utilities with other software solutions to this problem: http://www.dirfile.com/freeware/smtp.htm

Tool for 3×5 Card Notetakers

July 22, 2005 /

Another handy tool for you notetakers out there: 

 

A key Tinderbox lesson is simple: WRITE IT DOWN! Tinderbox is the tool for notes, but even Tinderbox can't help you analyze and organize notes that you forgot.

Get it here: Eastgate: Briefcase

Add a Uniball Jetstream pen to your pocket (my personal favorite) and you're In Like Flynt. 

Use Google Sitemaps to Increase Your Web Visibility

July 21, 2005 /

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content. Google Sitemaps exists to inform and direct Google's crawlers. If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change.

Here is a nice PHP tool to automate your Sitemap file creation: http://enarion.net/google/

Read more: Google Sitemaps