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Slideshare

Slideshare

The articles I write are one of my primary business assets, and I like to make them work as hard for me as possible by repurposing them in as many ways as possible. One of my repurposing tricks is to create a Powerpoint presentation from that article and upload it to share with others.

One of the places I share these presentations is on Slideshare. Slideshare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations, documents and pdfs. Slideshare is similar to a social networking site in that members are invited to regularly comment on slideshows, indicate their favorites, and download content. The content uploaded to the site spreads virally through blogs and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Anyone can view presentations and documents on topics that interest them. Slideshare is reported to have over 17 million monthly visitors.

With an account at Slideshare, you can:

• Embed slideshows into your own blog or web site.
• Share slideshows publicly or privately. There are several ways to share privately.
• Synch audio to your slides.
• Market your own event on Slideshare.
• Join groups to connect with SlideShare members who share your interests.
• Download the original file

Even though you can add audio to your presentations (like background music, for example) through Slideshare and save it as a slidecast, I don't choose to do that because the audio and slides are often not in sync. Creating a slide show is free of charge, although you do have to create an account to do so. They offer additional fee-based options for business lead generation.

You can see several of my slide presentations by visiting the Slideshare site and searching for my name. As of this writing, there doesn't appear to be a way to create a profile page featuring my slideshows, similar to what you might find at a social networking site.

Upload your slide presentation here.

Pure Text

Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? I update web pages frequently, and those of you who do the same know the perils of cutting and pasting from MS Word into any HTML editor -- all of Word's formatting comes with any copy and paste job you might do in this situation.

Now there's a free tool to help eliminate this headache, PureText. PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

After running PureText.exe, you will see a "PT" tray icon appear near the clock on your task bar. You can click on this icon to remove formatting from the text that is currently on the clipboard. You can right-click on the icon to display a menu with more options. The easiest way to use PureText is to simply use its hot-key to paste text instead of using the standard CTRL+V hot-key that is built into most Windows applications. To configure PureText, right-click on its tray icon and choose "Options" from the pop-up menu. The default hot-key is WINDOWS+V, but this can be changed. In this Options window, you can also configure PureText to run each time you log into Windows.

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

Download your free copy here.

Cool Text

I'm always searching for places that permit me to create logos, images, or buttons without having to use any type of design program. I prefer the plug and play method, where I simply choose what I want something to look like, enter the text, and it appears.

Cool Text is just that kind of program. Cool Text is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work. Simply choose what kind of image you would like. Then fill out a form and you'll have your own custom image created on the fly.

You can create both a text-based logo or button here using almost any font you can imagine and almost any color you can imagine. You pick your colors from a color palate, or fill in the RGB info, if you have that. You can also save your image in a variety of formats, from .jpg to .gif to .png. Once you have created the image, you can download it, edit it, get the HTML code, or email the image. Their terms of service permit you to use any of the generated graphics in any way, shape, or form without asking permission, although a link back to their site is appreciated.

Create your image here.

Track My Shipments

I order a lot of stuff online, primarily because I live in a more rural area where it's difficult to find exactly what I want and need locally. Sometimes if I have several orders that I've placed around the same time, it becomes tough for me to remember what is supposed to arrive when and what company is shipping it. And, even though each major carrier offers online tracking services, I have to log into their site and cut and paste the tracking numbers into their tracking area and then keep on doing it to get the latest news on my shipments.

Now I use a free service, TrackMyShipments.com. TrackMyShipments.com lets me forward my tracking email to them and the service monitors and maps the progress of my shipment. When you forward the email, their systems extracts the shipper (like Fedex) and tracking number automatically from the email without me having to do anything else.

After that I begin getting email updates about where the package is, its status, its estimated arrival date, etc. How easy is that?

Track your shipments here.

Newsletter Makeover

New Year, new newsletter look, right? Right before the holidays I read some high praise from Ken Foster of Shared Vision Network about John Neyman of Leader Excel Solutions, who was putting together Ken's ezine. I got in touch with John about his service, and today's newsletter is the result. I loved the updated, streamlined look, and hope you do, too!

I had a particular template in mind, so I sent John a link to my current ezine template, along with an idea of what I was seeking for the new template. In just a few days his team had returned my new template, and with just a few tweaks, it was complete! John is very easy to work with and his team gets it right the first time out, which is incredibly valuable to time-stressed entrepreneurs!

For $97/month, John's team will design your ezine template and format your HTML newsletter. You can read more about John's service here.

Online Business Dashboard

Do you have procedures in place so that someone can jump in and run your business in your absence?  Can you quickly locate all the critical information needed to run your business?

Now, you can......

Here's a partial listing of what you'll be able to track in your Online Business Dashboard:

• Client Information (contact info, logins, passwords, procedures, and notes)
• Support Team (accountant, attorney, insurance agent, banker, coach, assistant, graphic designer, website designer, computer technician)
• Legal Information (legal entity, state and federal ID numbers, copyrights, trademarks, will/living trust, vital papers)
• Office Equipment and Vendor List
• Office Procedures (email, snail mail, phone/fax service, filing systems, computer organization, software versions/serial numbers, back-up systems, passwords, travel information)
• Marketing Systems (newsletter procedures, website procedures, shopping cart procedures, merchant account procedures)
• Procedures for Bookkeeping, Banking, and Paying Taxes
• Blank Procedures Page for anything that is unique to your business!

Your Online Business Dashboard helps you easily delegate specific tasks to your assistant or other members of your support team without having to train them in the procedure.  How? Because you've now got a step-by-step guide that any member of your team can follow to update your contact database, publish your email newsletter, add a new product to your shopping cart, post an entry to your blog...you get the idea!

BONUS: When you purchase the Online Business Dashboard, you'll receive not one, but TWO different formats to choose from!  For those who prefer to manually write out the procedures, you'll receive a printable PDF document. Simply print out the document, place into a three-ring binder, and then start writing! For those who prefer to enter the information directly onto the computer, you'll receive a Word document version that you can type directly into. Then you can print out the completed version and place into a three-ring binder.

Order your today here.

Ninite

Ever bought a new computer and dreaded having to install all of your free programs again -- software like Firefox, Audacity, Adobe Reader, iTunes, etc.?  It's quite a time-consuming chore, since you have to find the download link at each of the sites and then download and install each piece of software individually.

Now you can install the most popular freebies from one site, Ninite. Ninite installs the most popular software fast (based on the ones you choose from their menu) with default settings and says "no" to browser toolbars and other junk. Ninite checks your PC's language and 64-bit support to install the latest, best version of each program. It runs on Windows XP/Vista/7 and works in the background unattended and 100% hands-free. All it does is automatically download and install the apps you select. There's no Ninite software to install.

Ninite for personal use if free of charge. They also offer a Pro version with a monthly fee that offers extra features like saved downloads and silent mode that make Ninite Pro faster and more flexible. The only downside to this site is that there's no link that explains what each of the featured software downloads does. So, if you're not already familiar with the app because you have it on your computer, you'll need to research any unknown apps you might be interested in adding to your computer to see what they do before adding them to your installation order.

Download your favorite free software apps here.

Standing Ovation

Is there someone in your life who needs cheering up, or just needs to know that s/he has done a great job?  Send that person a  Standing Ovation.  Even though it's an automated service, it feels great to be on the receiving end of one.  Or, if your day isn't going well, send one to yourself!  My business coach sent one to me several years ago, and it arrived just when I needed a boost!

Send your Standing Ovation here.

Screentoaster

Have you ever viewed a tutorial where the speaker is giving a tour of a website or some software and instead of seeing this person speak, you're seeing a view of her computer screen? This is commonly referred to as a screencast, and was most commonly created by purchasing Camtasia Studio software.

Now, you can create the same type of screencast for yourself with the free web-based screen recorder,  Screentoaster. ScreenToaster is designed to capture screen activity in real-time to rapidly create and share tutorials, demos, training, lectures and more. You can then share and stream videos online in Flash, embed them on blogs and webpages or send them by email.

To record a screencast video, simply click on "Start recording" or "Record", start recording using the shortcuts or via the recorder. You can add audio and an embedded webcam while you are recording. When finished, you can add subtitles, choose your thumbnail image, and describe and tag your video so other users can easily find your screencasts.

ScreenToaster is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux and is optimized to run on Firefox 2 +, Internet Explorer 7 +, Chrome, Opera 9 and Safari.

Create your screencast  here.

TweetMeme

Recently I've been seeing these handy little retweet (RT) buttons on a number of blog posts that I've read. What's nice about this RT button is that if you like the post, it's very easy to simply RT it to your Twitter followers.

TweetMeme  is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorizes these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you're interested in. It's easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through their RSS feeds and Twitter accounts.

By using the TweetMeme Button, you can discover new content and tweet about it. However, you do need to set up an account before you'll be able to use the button. The button provides a fully integrated URL shortener and the title of the story or page. Each link, which is posted on Twitter, adds one to the tweet count for that story. Once the story has reached a critical mass of tweets, it makes it into the top 10 on the front page and gets tweeted by TweetMeme's Twitter account.

Each story on TweetMeme has a TweetMeme Button which integrates both the current number of tweets that story has and allows you to easily retweet the link. You can also leave comments on every story featured on TweetMeme, with the option of retweeting the best comments out to Twitter.

Install the  TweetMeme Button quickly and easily on your website or blog, and let your users quickly and easily retweet your stories straight from your website. They currently offer a plug-in for Wordpress, but since I use Typepad for my blog, I have to manually cut and paste the script into each blog post at this time.

Help your blog readers RT your content  here.