It’s hard enough generating leads and business but when you have to do estimates and invoicing and accept payments from clients it seems an impossible tasks. How many times have consultants froze in their tracks when a client asks them for a quote or an estimate or mail them an invoice?

Clients big and small judge you on your professionalism not only from the first meeting and your actual work but from all the small details of how you handle them as a customer from start to finish

Companies Big and Small need documentation, bids and invoices not only to get approval and funding but also for tax purposes

Enter Freshbooks- Freshbooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service developed to save you time and make your business look professional

Freshbooks Features:

• Easily create, send and manage invoices

• Streamline your business through recurring invoices. Set up auto-billing to automatically charge your client’s credit card.

• Track time and expenses

• Send invoices by snail mail or email

• Accept payment with paypal, authorize.net and other services

• Automatically send invoices & late payment notices

• Look like a pro and impress your clients by giving your clients online access to their invoices and account history

• Automate late payment reminders to your clients

• For a nominal fee send snail mail invoices straight to your clients. Each invoice is printed with your logo and includes a return envelope for the client’s convenience.

• Generate invoices based on time, expenses, and fixed cost services/items or any combination thereof.

A few days after I signed up for Freshbooks I got an invoice in the mail from Freshbooks. I’m thinking why am I getting an invoice I’m using the free trial. Upon closer examination it’s a sample invoice from me a sample invoice a customer of mine would receive in the mail complete with return envelope. Impressive!

The only feature Freshbooks is missing is an iphone client to enter in expenses and other items on the go

If you’re in need or a client billing/invoicing solution give Freshbooks a look

Tags: freshbooks, invoices, time tracking, web 2.0

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Ispionage.com is a new pay per click competitive intelligence tool that allows marketers to set up competitive alerts tied to keywords or ads across the three major advertising engines.

When I first saw this tool I thought of keyword elite and all the other keyword tools that have appeared over the past year such as keycompete.com, keywordspy.com and spyfu.com to name a few

At first glance signing up and viewing the training materials it seems this tool handles all aspects of pay per click marketing from generating related keywords to researching competitors and discovering not only other similar ads but the keywords other advertisers as using

Ispionage is broken down into three main areas projects, alerts, and keyword toolsYou create a project to monitor keywords. The free version allows you to get a feel for the system and monitor 35. The keyword tab will tell you how many ads for that keywords across google, yahoo and msn and how many days that particular keyword has been monitored

The strength of this tool is it’s alerting capabilities. You can set up alerts tied to keywords and/or advertisers

For projects you can set an alert when new advertisers that use any of the keywords in your list on all or selected search engines.

• Alerts you to new advertisers in your territory

• Alerts you to URL trademark infringement

• Alerts you to new advertiser ad copy

• Alerts you to new advertiser keywords

You can also set up alerts when selected advertisers add new ads or new keywords. These alerts can be sent up to six different email addresses. You can also set up mobile alerts if you choose

Most tools charged a high monthly fee usually between $39 and $99 a month for a set amount of keywords to monitor

Ispionage.com has three pricing levels from $39 to $79. to get the competitor alerts you must sign up at the $59 a month level

The tool is great for affiliates or search publishers that need to monitor trademark keywords across google, yahoo and msn. The tool sends out alerts when ads appear using the selected keywords. This saves the unpleasant chore of sifting threw the three engines looking for advertisers violating trademark bidding or trying to manually monitoring the three search engines for specific keyword or ad use.

Tags: ispionage, ppc, alerts, ppc competitive intelligence

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Circos is a new style of local search labeled as “me-centric search”. The beta version of the service enables users to search for hotels and restaurants using content aggregated from the likes of blog comments and user generated rating sites

The difference between this type of search and google or yahoo is your searches are based on the opinions of other users. You receive a personalized guide of seemingly trustworthy answers from across the web

For example instead of searching for Mexican restaurants in Phoenix you can search for Hip mexican restaurants in Phoenix or a hotel search can be along the likes of phoenix hotels that are romantic with fitness centers

Each of the results is scored from “A” thur “F” for each search term and how well the description fits for reviewers. You can even validate each one of the results received with the actual customer opinions that make up the individual grade

Several metropolitan areas from Los Angeles to Washington DC are included in this release. After running a few searches
it becomes apparent you might need to tweak your search terms to find exactly what your looking for as well as reading thru the comments to make your determination

I searched for a hip hotel in phoenix and one of the results was the Hilton Garden Inn at the Phoenix Airport. No offense to Hilton or the quality of the property but I don’t think anyone in Phoenix would consider that place hip. When you read thru the comments you see the hip comment comes from complaints from quests about traffic playing load hip hop music at the Waffle House next door

Tags: Circos, me-centric search

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Pieces of this have existed for quite a while for example

• You can update your blog with twitter- there are widgets to show you latest tweets
• Your twitters can post to your blog automatically
• Tumblr can access different feeds from twitter, flickr, wordpress and del.icio.us and create posts
• Jaiku can pull in your tweets and display them
• You can display twitter and blog posts within Facebook

But the question is now how to create one message and post across several services? This gets a little complicated because each service can have a slightly different feature set for example video or audio in addition to text

Currently there are two solutions I’ve found to this perplexing issue:

Hellotxt
Post to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Tumblr, Meemi, Beeraad, Frazr and GoZub all at once. Unfortunately there is not a mobile client but this is a great way to post to multiple services although you could end up double posting. As I listed above you can set up a few of these services to pull from one another. This would be great to use to post to pownce, facebook and twitter together

Workaround with Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a little utility that can take almost any blog and feed it into twitter. A workaround so to speak is to take the feeds generated from pownce and facebook and use twitterfeed to post to twitter. For example Pownce generated RSS feeds from user’s public time lines. If you have a pownce account typically your feed will be http://www.pownce.com/feeds/public/yourid

I’m sure more solutions to this issue will be forthcoming as most of these services have open API’s and want users to be able to post across different systems

Tags: pownce, twitter, facebook, tumblr, jaiku, microblogging, flickr, wordpress

Technorati Tags: microblogging, southwest seo, twitter

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

The requirements to broadcast on the move are:

• Ultra light laptop
• extended life laptop battery
• portable usb webcam w/ microphone mounted somewhere to your person
• EVDO Rev A modem
• Unlimited internet cellular plan

I had also seen the widget on other sites trying to raise money as well

It’s a little like running your own telethon and interesting in that when you visit the site you can see how far the individual or site has progressed against the goal

Chipin.com tracks your donations and provides a secure way for users to donate. Chipin.com handles all the transactions and all money is deposited into a paypal account

If you don’t have a webpage or blog you can get free hosting at yourname.chipin.com

This is a great way to raise money on your site for any cause of your choice from your monthly hosting bill to raising money for equipment

Tags: Chipin, paypal

Technorati Tags: chipin, southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

The answer is control. When you bring messages any messages into Outlook you can control where the messages go, how you are notified and where (mobile or desktop). I use twitter quite a bit but up to this point I have not enabled it on my cell phone. I am a little worried about receiving tons of messages on my cell phone and having to sort thru them to get to the information I want. If I bring Twitter into Outlook I can filter the messages by sender, keyword, time of day etc. If I’m syncing mail to my cell phone I can further control what messages get thru to me bypassing constant interruptions throughout the day.

Features of OutTwit include

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates as Outlook messages.
• Configurable new message check interval.
• Assign custom categories to new messages.
• Shorten URLs with tinyurl.

One downside is this is only available on the PC and not the Mac. A very interesting twitter tool to add control to the daily onslaught of information thrown at most digital workers

Tags: OutTwit, outlook, twitter

Technorati Tags: southwest seo, twitter

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

I love mindmaps and think they are great for everything from planning to projects to anything that involves multiple steps or pieces to complete. You organize the information visually and naturally much like if you thinking out loud about individual tasks to be completed

This is a mindmap created in freemind. If you wanted to show someone the scope of internet marketing and a variety of the different pieces involved this is an excellent tool and summary of the processes involved

This is a great start I could spend days creating expanded & more detailed maps for each piece of this map.

For those of you that use mindmanager you can import the freemind map with this import tool
The below is an excerpt from the mindmap:

Tags: Mindmap, Freemind, Mindmanager

Technorati Tags: mindmap, scottsdale 360

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

I’m not really sure how this works or what info it uses to determine the results but I typed in this domain and here are the results- A male audience distributed almost evenly among the age groups- OK!

Tags: Demographics, Microsoft adcenter, demographics predictor

Technorati Tags: southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Heyspread is a new free tool for uploading your videos to multiple networks in one shot

The supported networks are:
sevenload
YouTube
Facebook
MySpace
Google Videos
Yahoo Videos
Dailymotion
Blip.tv
Photobucket
Metacafe
Revver
Veoh
Vsocial
Vimeo
Putfile

While this is not an exhaustive list of the available video networks available it is enough to get any video exposure. The other point to consider is several of the sites listed above also can distribute your videos to other sites with a little interaction

There are other more costly solutions to this problem but considering this is free it’s worth a look

Tags: heyspread, video blog, video, vlog, viral video

Technorati Tags: southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Red Herring is back with video, blogging, social networking

A superfast iphone portal for all you facebook fans

Yahoo pushing forward with ads that adjust according to what is known about the user

Why just twitter when you can twitter and jaiku together

Another inspirational blog story

You have to click these sphinn feeds twice to read the feed- pay for access to cell phone number database

Trackbacks revisted?

a great iphone portal from netvibes- all the cool new stuff is iphone related these days

Tags: Red Herring, iphone, facebook, yahoo smart ads, twitter, jaiku, blogger, seo, sphinn, netvibes

Technorati Tags: southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com