For the past two months the Small Business Administration has been posting informational and advice videos to YouTube.  Last week they went a step further and formed an SBA Channel on the video sharing service.

The Delivering Success series, which form the bulk of the channel’s current content, offers tips on topics ranging from hiring, to marketing, to mission adaptability.

These videos on their own would be a sufficient reason to visit the SBA Chanel on YouTube, but there is another lesson that can be learned while there.

While on YouTube you may also look at the historical viewership data of each video.  …

I was raised to speak English well and to love the language.

Thanks, Dad.

My father was an officer, a gentleman and a Renaissance man. He grew up poor (…Oklahoma in the 30’s…) but smart. He joined the Navy, which got him a college education and two great careers (20 years with the Navy, 20 years with IBM), not to mention a life-changing introduction to the general’s daughter, and three adorable children.

Dad not only gave me the DNA, he gave me exceptional examples and lessons about loving the English language:

Read

My folks did not …

If you are unfamiliar with Google Voice, it is a new online telephone routing service available for public beta testing. In order to enroll in the service you must request an invitation at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/

The Good:

• Google Voice lets you set up a single telephone number that will simultaneously forward to any number of other telephone lines.
• When adding a telephone line to your Google Voice account, you must demonstrate that you can pick up and answer on the line.
• Once a line has been added to your Google Voice account, you can route your calls out through Google Voice so …
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This week I conclude my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.  If you enjoyed this series, or found it useful, please comment on this post.

Origins of the term SPAM

Anyone telling you that SPAM is an acronym (at least in regards to its online usage) is pulling your leg.  It comes from Monty Python’s SPAM skit, where SPAM manages …

Blogging on my birthday! Here are some gifts from me to you:

Lifehacker

When I worked a corporate job, most of what I learned about technology was “over the shoulder” learning – watching other people. When I started my own business, solo in my own office, I had no tech experts to observe. Thank goodness for Lifehacker! From the Lifehacker blog, I’ve gotten life-changing advise on technology and productivity, and even non-tech but essential skills such as how to quickly peel hardboiled eggs and make a chocolate cake in a coffee mug.

Paymo

Free, web-based …

You’ve been there… eyelids growing heavy, mind wandering, sitting through another boring business presentation. And what happens when it’s your turn to speak? Chances are you are committing some of the same presentations sins as everyone else. One of the greatest of these sins is the misuse of presentation software like PowerPoint.

Slides laden with bulleted text are not ingredients for a powerful presentation. But many of us don’t know any better. The templates provided by the software seem to beg for bullets and text and slide titles and logos and clipart. What were meant as tools to make …

Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …

Who Are You Writing For?

Writing for your own enjoyment makes total sense on a personal blog.  However, when you are writing for a professional website you should be writing for an audience that has a professional relationship to you.  Regardless of whether you are writing for peers, employees, clients, or vendors you need to speak to your audience for them to engage with what you say.

Writing in the second person helps.  The real world is not like grade school, and you will not be marked off for acknowledging that you have a reader and that they have personal and professional …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

A Quick Recap

Last week we discussed the importance of letting members of your mailing list chose to opt out, and also to periodically ask them to opt back in so that your least engaged readers will weed themselves out before they’re tempted to hit the dreaded SPAM button.

What E-Mail Monitoring …

Technical writing is about procedures and steps in order.  Not all technical writing is about technology. Recipes are technical writing: they’re steps in order, right?  You’ll really mess up the souffle if you put in the Gruyere before you whip the egg whites.

Consider these best practices of technical writing in your every day written communication:

Give warnings up front.
If the sentence contains if,  start the sentence with it.  Most people don’t read instructions completely; they prefer to act rather than to read. Force them to pay attention. They will thank you.

Notice the improvement from the first example to the second:

• Click the …
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