We are very fortunate to do business in a time and age where you can get business quality software for free or close to free. They are everywhere. For a long time, I’ve been saving these tools. Every time someone asks for a software they could use to do something, I whip out this list of tools. I have finally decided to compile them all into one convenient handbook. It was originally supposed to be only 100 then it grew and grew to the final 180 – there’s actually more than 180. I just didn’t count some of them.

The tools for a ton of different things. From project management and accounting to web conferencing. Get it from my site if you’d like a copy.

“I just received a ton of bounced emails that aren’t written by me. The email address is mine, but honestly, I did not send them. Has my email/website I been hacked?”

While hacking is always a possibility and I do not want to discount that at all, the reason is probably not that but rather email hijacking. You see, it is easy to change the “From” address. All you need to do is change it in your email program. Instead of your name and email address, you can change it to just about any email address. That’s what they are doing. They aren’t sending emails via your account or your server. Just using your email address as the “From” address. Because bounces go back to the “From” address, that’s why you are receiving them.

For a long time, there is really little you can do about this. I can send an email pretending to be you and vice versa any time. But if your web host supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), you might want to have it turned on. What it does is only allow email to be sent from specified domain. This way, a hijacker who always sends emails from his own or any spoofed/fake domain, is prevented from sending any mail. The thing you need to watch when turning this on is to make sure that any other domain you may be sending email from is in this ‘whitelist’ or your own emails won’t go out either.

For me, this is great because I like the simplicity of using Google Sites to create a Wiki of our organization’s work flow, operating manuals and how-to’s. But the fact that the data is ’stuck’ on Google Sites made us re-think it because it takes a lot of my time to write these manuals and while I’ve not lost anything on Google yet, that’s the keyword – yet. Besides, what if something comes along I like better and want to switch? Data portability is crucial.

With the import/export tool, I can finally resume using Google Sites and create a backup of our documentation in HTML microformats. It is written in Java – which means you have to have Java (not to be confused with Javascript) installed. It is open source and you can download it here.

That’s why, I no longer use our inkjet. The only inkjet printer we have is a multi-function we purchased a few years ago and I don’t even use it for printing – only as a fax machine and scanner. For everyday printing, we have one color laser and one black and white printer.

Don’t laser printers cost a bomb?

That’s the myth. If you go for black and white – which is more than sufficient for everyday use at a home office, do you really need a document in color to read it?, you can get a decent laser printer for under $200 even a wireless one. Sometimes, you can catch sales for under $100. Color laser printers though definitely do cost a lot more but it is not as much as it used to.

But what about toner? They are high!

What is expensive is relative. Yes, I did order a cartridge for my color laser printer this week, and yes, it did cost me $34 for one color – black. BUT, guess when was the last time I ordered toner? August 2007! It is true. I had no idea until I looked at my Amazon account and past orders. WOW. Trust me, that color laser gets a lot of prints for a home office because my husband is kinda print happy. At the end of the day, the cost per page is really low compared to inkjets. Plus, love the fact I don’t have to be running out of ink and having to run to the store regularly.

If you feel your printer is literally sucking you dry – go laser.

Consider just how many blogs and bloggers are out there. Too many. Almost every one of them have been told that pictures add interest, visual appeal and focus to their content. Free image sites are cropping up everywhere. There is a demand. Bloggers can’t afford to pay for stock photos on every single post they make yet they want that visual connection. So they turn to open source or Creative Commons License images.

The company who did that Flickr campaign, sold a physical product and they had their web site nicely displayed or worked into the shot. While the article did not say, I would not be surprised if they received credit link backs too. I think this works great for businesses who sell physical items. Quit making low quality shots. Even with a simple point and click digital camera, with a little effort you could come up with really nice product shots. Release a few of them into the wild. Let people use it on their blogs, even print. It doesn’t cost you anything and could turn out to be a great way to get your name out there.

Photo from Multimedia-stock

There are plenty of ways to do that of course, from good old fashioned paper notebook to tools like Evernote. Recently, I stumbled upon PeepNote. It is an app where you can import your peeps and jot notes about them for your reference. I suppose it does have some appeal and kind of transforms Twitter into a contacts list. As far as I can tell it is free but limited only to 250 friends. The video below will give you a rough overview of the service.

Thank you page – this is the page where people will be directed to after they complete the payment process. If you are selling digital access or download, this would a page where you tell people how to access the secured content or where and how they can download the item they just purchased. If you are selling physical goods, this is the place where you tell people what to expect next. E.g. when do you typically ship the product, where do they go for help or if they have questions.

Merchant account – a merchant account allows you to take credit card payments. You don’t always need a merchant account to start selling which I’ll get into a little later under payment processor.

SSL – stands for Secure Sockets Layer – basically, it is technology that allows data passed between a user’s browser and your web host be encrypted and secure. A user knows the page is secured when a lock appears on the bottom right corner of their browser. Something we have all been taught to look out for. To get that lock on your web page, you need to purchase an SSL certificate. They are purchased yearly. Depending on what you use to process the payment, you may not need it. However, because buyers are conditioned to look for the lock symbols, it can help boost confidence.

Payment processor – these are the people who takes the information from the customer, e.g. credit card information, submits and does whatever needs to be done with the credit card companies to deduct the money and deposits it into your bank account. Examples are, PayPal, Clickbank, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, Worldpay. Some of these payment processors do more than others. For example with PayPal, Clickbank and 2Checkout, you don’t need a merchant account to take payments. Basically, they use their merchant connections to process the payment on your behalf. Because of that, they often cost more per transaction.

PCI compliance – this is a guideline set up by the major credit card companies to help business create and maintain more secure payment processes and methods of storing data. The ultimate objective is to protect credit card holders. If you process your payments entirely through 3rd party systems like PayPal, 2Checkout or Clickbank, you are automatically compliant otherwise, you may need to at least complete a self assessment or quarterly scan. For more PCI compliance information…

Now that we’ve clarified that, let’s see what the common questions are.

Do I need a shopping cart to start selling?

No. It depends. If you are selling physical products. If you have a lot of different types of products or you have only one product , say, T-shirts but in varying colors/sizes/designs, then I’d definitely recommend a shopping cart because it makes it easier for people to order, and for both of you to track the items ordered, store order history and so on.

I have PayPal and they have add to cart buttons that work well. Do I still need a shopping cart?

PayPal buttons are so simple and easy to use. I love them. The biggest down side to it is, once the payment is processed, your customer information is trapped in PayPal and PayPal is not the best place to trace the history of what a customer has purchased. It can’t effectively give you insightful reports like how many people purchased a particular item, which item is most popular this month and a myriad of other information. There is also no easy way to contact all your customers at once via PayPal which means if you decide to offer a coupon to customers only you can’t. Also, if you want to start an affiliate program, a shopping cart system with affiliate capabilities is definitely a plus because PayPal does not offer that.

While you don’t need it, but having one means you can do a lot more marketing that ultimately grow your business.

How do I set up my website so someone can pay and download a book instantly?

A lot of this really depends what you are using to process your payments and your shopping cart system. Here is a general overview of the process and what you have to do. First, create a thank you page. You can link to the download directly from this page if you want or, you can create a list just for customers of this product and tell people to sign up to it to receive the download link in an email. If your shopping cart allows you to upload the product directly to their site that’s even better because what happens is, the shopping cart system will create a private thank you page with the download link. This way, those who have not paid for your product, won’t be able to get to that download.

Then, you create a checkout button from within your shopping cart. Tell the cart where the thank you page is OR upload the product to the cart. Complete the information necessary e.g. price, affiliate commissions etc. The cart should then have a button or link ready for you to pick up. This is the link where people will click to start the payment process. You put this link or button on your web site or page where you have more information about the product, like a sales page or product description page.

Some carts are more involved than others because they have more features so you may find gaps in the overview above. However, that should give you a big picture of the steps involved. This concludes the Back to Basics mini series. I hope throughout the week, it has helped clarify a few things for you. Remember, we all started out as newbies so don’t be afraid to ask.

Image by sanja gjenero

How do I build a mailing list?

That is a big, objective question with many different tangents we can go off into, but we will focus on the technical process. The overall big picture is quite simple actually. First, you will need a system (software) or service that lets you send emails out to the masses. Next, you need to create a ‘list’ within that mailing list system you are using. Depending on what you are doing with the list, but it is recommended you then create a welcome email inside that list. This will be the first email people get when they join your list. Finally, you get the code which will give you the sign up form and put it on your website. That’s all in a nutshell.

What can I use to build a mailing list?

There are a lot of email list systems out there. Some well known examples are, Aweber, iContact, Constant Contact and Mailchimp. These are all fully hosted, web based services. Which means you will have a monthly cost involved, but at the same time you won’t have to worry about what percentage of your emails get delivered (also called deliverability), you won’t have to worry about the software or emails slowing down your web site. I highly recommend the post Is Saas For You to get a better understanding why it actually costs you less in the long run to pay someone a monthly fee for mailing lists.

Why can’t I just use my current email account and send through Outlook/Thunderbird/Mail/Gmail?

The answer couldn’t be simpler. Because your Internet Service Provider who gave you the email account, Gmail, Yahoo or any other email account providers often have fine print in their terms of use that restrict you from using your account for mass email purposes. Sure, you can email your group of 20-30 friends and family without problems and they are often OK with that. But surely when building a mailing list for your business, you want as many prospects and possible. Besides, any business, no matter how small, you will find, hitting hundreds if not thousands of subscribers is not difficult to do. Once you start getting numbers, that’s when mailing through any of these accounts will violate the terms of use.

Ultimately, this means you could lose your Internet or email service. That is not what you want.

My web host includes an autoresponder. Why do I need to pay for another autoresponder service?

Because they are different animals altogether. One is simplistic, the other one is a little more intelligent. The one that comes with most web hosting accounts is simplistic. The only thing it can do is kick back a reply automatically when someone sends the address an email. You still see some people asking you to email them at a certain address and you will get a report or download instantly. It cannot capture the name and address of whomever is emailing it and put it in a list and it cannot follow up with the person who emailed at a later date. Autoresponder services often give you what’s called a sequential auto responder. Which means, you can create a series of messages – however many you like and tell it to follow up with the individual who subscribed to the list based on intervals that you set. Maybe you want to email the prospect everyday for a week or once a week for a year, or everyday for a week and 5 day intervals after, you can.

Big difference in features don’t you agree? There are some hosts who are exceptions to the rule because these hosts understand marketing online. Some hosts do give you web hosting accounts with sequential autoresponders so if unsure, always check with your host. Most of the time though they don’t.

What is a broadcast?

A broadcast generally refers to the feature that allows you to send emails to everyone on that list. Some services even let you schedule when the email is to go out.

I already have an Aweber account, do I need another autoresponder service or software?

Nope. Aweber can do both autoresponse and broadcast. In fact, many of the bigger names can do both but if you’re not sure, check with their help desk.

I’m sure you will have more questions as you dive into the process of building your mailing list. If you don’t there’s something wrong! If you find yourself confounded with technical road blocks along the way, feel free to ask me.

Image by T. Al Nakib

Host or Web host – A website is at it’s core, a collection of files and data. These files can reside on your computer but that means it can only be seen by you which won’t do you any good. You need to put them on a computer system where everyone online can access it. A web host is a company who owns computer systems that are configured so that the files you put on their systems can be viewed by everyone on the Internet. So if you want a web site, that’s one of the key things you need. An account with a web host.

Domain – Simply put, a domain is the address of your website. Sparkplugging.com is this site’s domain. TechBasedMarketing.com is the domain of my website. So any .com, .org, .net, .me etc is a domain. This is also essential to having your own website. Sometimes you can create websites without buying a domain. This usually means, you piggyback on someone else’s domain. For example, have you seen sites or blogs like sweetcaroline.blogspot.com? Or myhomeimprovementcenter.typepad.com? These are sub-domains that ride on top of the main domain. Going back to the examples, blogspot.com and typepad.com are the main domains.

Since we are all building this website or blog for our business or to create a business around, I do not recommend you use those domains as your permanent address. Domains are cheap now. Invest $8 or $10 a year on a name that is uniquely you that you can brand and take along with you no matter which web host you go with and no matter what web building tools you use.

Now that we have the two most basic things explained, let’s move on to the methodology. Whether you choose to outsource completely or DIY, you should know the common methods as it will affect what you can or cannot do down the road.

Using Website Builders – These are often all in one packages, where you pay a monthly fee and you receive web hosting and a multitude of tools to build your web site with. Very often, the tools are web based. Which means you can work on your website anytime, anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Website builders are also very often designed with the newbie in mind so everything is made to be simple, straightforward and easy to use. Many people start with one of these and graduate to other methods as their skills grow. You often don’t need to know HTML but it would help. I often recommend these tools for the complete newcomer. The down side is they are often a little pricier. Also, as you progress and learn new things about web building or business online, there may be things the builder cannot do or can do but not the way you want it to.

Using Desktop Software – These are tools like Dreamweaver and Expression Web. You purchase the software and install it on your computer (not web host). You build the site on your computer and it can connect to your web host to publish the files. In many ways, this can be simple too. These tools often expose you to the underlying architecture of web pages – HTML. While you don’t necessarily need to be a master at HTML to use it, but you can toggle between design and code. I’ve found this the best way to learn HTML which I highly recommend anyone who owns a website to get little bit of knowledge at least. As you can imagine, it may be a little more frustrating than a website builder to get right and understand where all the pieces go, but on the other hand this also helps you build a larger skill set that will serve you well down the road. You may also want to know that sites you build with desktop based software are often static. Which means you won’t be able to add on interactive things like a forum at a click of the button.

Using Web Based Scripts – Scripts are like software you can install on your website. Some of these scripts allow you to install a system resembling a web site builder on your own website. Which means you get much of the convenience, capability and ease of use as a website builder entirely your own, it is cheaper because you only pay for hosting, many of these scripts are free. Here’s the bummer. For a newcomer, it is not always easy to install these scripts. If you can get someone to install it for you, you’re off to a good start. But could quickly and easily find yourself in deep waters when you have to edit the design. If going this route, I highly recommend you have someone build and design it the way you want it and then learn to tweak it at your own pace. Once again, HTML knowledge will be helpful.

There are still a gazillion things I wish I could cover here, but I’ll end up writing a novel. Perhaps we will revisit and build upon this in the future. However, this should give you at the beginning level, an overview of what you can expect and hopefully an idea which way you should go based on how comfortable you are learning technology that is new to you. Meanwhile, if you ever get stuck with jargon, you might want to head on over to InternetMarketingDefinitions.

Image by ivan petrov

One of the things he has to learn to do is to edit websites I created for him in the past, learn to manage his own mailing list, shopping cart and so on. It is a lot. Some of the things that are so common place to me and most of the people I deal with on a daily basis, feels like rocket science to him. He knows it isn’t of course, but it can feel like being in a massive maze. At the same time, as we work together, it amazes me how much knowledge I have accumulated over the years. Thankfully, he’s such a trooper. Which leads me to think, maybe some of you too are brand new, just starting out or have begun and still feel some areas are ‘too much to handle’.

Then, this week is a good one for you as we go back to the basics. I’ll be covering some technical jargon and concepts that you may encounter running your own business online. We will begin with Websites, followed by Autoresponder basics and end the week with an intro to shopping carts.

While I can’t possibly cover every aspect of those topics, I will strive to help you build the foundation so that, at the very least, you will know what people are talking or writing about and be ready to move on. I hope you will join me as we begin this mini-series tomorrow.

Image by gerard79

So what changed? Did I just start making more money and that suddenly meant I had to spend it monthly on software? No. If that is the case then it isn’t very good cash flow management. The sad fact is, it took a big loss for me to re-think and appreciate the value of using hosted third party applications and this is a story I tell people often. Not because I think you should always opt for software as a service solutions but because it really happened to me and I want to help you avoid a similar situation.

What happened?

It was simple. I installed a mailing list script on my web site one day and within an hour, it flooded the web hosts’ email servers to the point it almost crashed. The web host tried contacting me. But of course I had to burn the midnight oil and had went to bed after the install. He unsuccessfully tried to email me for hours and eventually, shut my account down and deleted all my web sites. All in all, the script started sending thousands of emails every hour and I hadn’t even started building my list yet.

Imagine the horror and humiliation when I started work the next morning. Here I was, thinking I was so smart, by hosting it myself and saving a monthly payment. I realized then just how little $20 a month was compared to what was at stake. Many years have passed since but that memory is still fresh and raw at certain periods today.

• If you are in the same boat, considering a hosted software versus one you install on your own web server, consider these points.
• You don’t have to spend valuable time upgrading the software, better spend time marketing.
• You don’t have to worry about people hacking it – and the many hours cleaning up if they did.
• You don’t have to think about the software being compatible with the server or crashing it – a biggie.
• When the system goes down, you have someone in the know to ask and demand for answers – it is a good feeling to be able to let others work out a problem.
• When the system goes down, you don’t have to upset my schedule and delay projects to fix it.
• You also don’t have to hire people to fix it. You know that they have properly qualified developers working on their system, people whom we on our own may not able to afford to pay.

Does that mean you should completely outsource your software? That’s going to be a lot of monthly payments.

Absolutely not. What I recommend is, outsource those that you won’t normally have sufficient technical knowledge to handle yourself or you don’t have someone technical you can hire on a regular basis. If you’re getting started and don’t have much money to invest. I understand you won’t have that option. But at the very barest basics, for your mailing list or autoresponder, sign up with a reputable service. If you don’t spend on anything else, spend the  money on that.

Image by Karl-Erik Bennion

This week we’re Sparking an Idea About Purging

Among my circle of business friends, I’ve seen a lot of purging lately. Well actually, it is an ongoing thing but there seem to be ‘pockets’ of times when someone starts to realize some of their projects no longer fit their goal. It usually happens when someone ’sees the light’ as to their direction and role within the business. When they start letting go it somehow inspires others to also start their own cleansing routine.

I have to say it is quite interesting and actually somewhat inspiring to see people find their voice and the courage to let go. It’s not easy.

In my quest to own my own business, I’ve started down several roads. One of them was an at home travel agent. It was a total bomb and worse of all, I spent over a year and a good chunk of money to make it work. Was it a bad business? No. It was the wrong time to enter the business plus I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. Even so, letting go is really, really hard even if it is a dud.

Maybe that’s why in this business, I have been very cautious about churning out new web sites and new products. Part of it is because I am kinda slow but that I’ve found oddly to work out to my benefit. It means less purging and less jumping down different rabbit holes which can drain you.

What if you find yourself in a situation where you do have too many things going on and need to rid the business of excess baggage? There are many ways to close a project, but if you decide that selling is a good way, you might want to look into these avenues.

• eBay Websites and Business for sale
• BuySellWebsite.com
• Flippa
• Digital Point Marketplace
• Webmaster’s Marketplace

Don’t forget to check into the business forums you normally frequent too and scope out your own network of people.

1. Must be able to control access to the video
2. Have a sharp looking player – Youtube is a little unprofessional especially if the video goes on the the sales letter
3. Not be hosted on their own web hosting account

The third requirement can be huge because bandwidth can get very expensive if you have a lot of hits on the video and videos are much, much larger which means one simple video can suck up all your bandwidth for the month in a heartbeat.

If you want to DIY – I’d probably say go with Amazon S3. I host all 50+ videos for the Blogging Starter Pack on Amazon S3. You can purchase a nice video player pretty inexpensively from places like FlashDen. However, this still requires a little bit of technical work. Many small business owners I talk to like and want the convenience of Youtube but with more privacy options and a better player is that really that much to ask?

I personally think no but from my research, there seems to be an unserved market here. Video hosting sites that allow business/commercial for small business use (read budget friendly) is pretty hard to come by.

My first stop was Vimeo because I liked the quality of the videos there but alas – this is what I found in their FAQ’s.

So scratch Vimeo. Next, there is Brightcove. This company has many high profile customers but they do not publish their pricing and while this is not a reliable method, it kinda leads me to think they may be expensive like enterprise level expensive and possibly beyond the reach of small and micro businesses.

Finally, after running through several video hosting sites that do not allow commercial use, I re-visited a system I have been testing out – Easy Video Producer. The people who created this tool made it for network marketers who want to use videos as a method of building their list or lead generation purposes. I’m just giving you fair warning that if the video and copy on the sites looks skewed towards that, it is. Actually, they confused me a lot too but I took a chance to get signed up since it is free to check out the video system. While their user interface could be improved, it looks a bit dated and at times confusing, if you focus on the tools itself, this thing is pretty cool.

Here’s what I liked:

If you want to put your video on a squeeze page or opt-in page, they have pre-made templates, some of them fairly nice looking. All you need to do is record your video – you can do this using your normal video recording tools or if you don’t have one, a web cam will work, EVP has a on site video recorder much like YouTube you can record on the fly. Then upload or save it. They do go through an approval process which can be a drag if you’re in a hurry. Hopefully they will remove this or have quicker methods of approval. Once your video goes live, then all you need to do is copy the link to the video, copy the embed code if you’re posting on to your own web pages. Or, you can push the video to a squeeze page template they provide.

Oh and yes, you can make the video private to their network and still embed the video on your own pages which fulfills part of the requirements.

There is just one caveat – they are right now re-launching their web hosting service – a sister site. So be prepared for emails in your inbox promoting that.

Image by Keenan Milligan

This week we’re Sparking an Idea About Being a Lifetime Learner

Growing up, I’ve always thought learning is all about going to school, getting a certification or a degree. Still, I loved learning new things, how to program, how to build web pages. In my mind it wasn’t a real education that could be translated to be anything useful – like something I could actually earn a living from. It was only a few years ago that I saw the folly of that thinking.

My thoughts for this week’s meme is pretty simple. Learning doesn’t have to equate to degrees on the wall to be useful. We learn stuff every single day that we can utilize in our jobs, our businesses and make life better for ourselves and our family. We are so blessed to live in this high tech era because now, we can learn all kinds of stuff from our peers online. All you need is the desire and drive. If we stop learning we also stop growing but that’s not the worse thing, we start shrinking and that’s not good.

I’ll leave you with a little Chinese proverb to chew on…

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back

P/S: If you’d like to learn about Internet tech stuff, drop by my blog often and get signed up to my newsletter or visit my Youtube Channel.

Ctrl+S – Save as for most Windows based software. No more reaching for your mouse when you want to save a document quickly and save more often too

Ctrl+T – Open a new tab in Firefox

Ctrl+F – Find! Love this. Use it most on Firefox when I have to find a word or string of text on a page. Great for finding code too.

Ctrl+Z – Undo! Who could live without undo?

Ctrl+Tab – Switching between open windows.

Alt+Tab – Cycling through tabs – great on Firefox too if you have lots of tabs open.

Ctrl+A – Select all – yeah you can do mouse-like stuff too

Alt+4 – Close window

Windows+E – Open my documents folder – love this! So often throughout a day I switch between the browser and looking up files using explorer. This makes it much faster than clicking Start >> My Documents

Windows+D – Show desktop.

F2 – Rename a file.

For a more comprehensive list, see this article on Microsoft.com. Also, keep in mind that every application has its hotkeys for example did you know Gmail also has hotkeys? Check those out here.

Lynette enjoys discovering new ways to use technology or new technologies to use in a business and in turn help her clients apply them. You can find also Lynette at her blog, Twitter and Facebook

This week we’re Sparking an Idea About Following Your Gut

As small business owners, we’ve been doubted a lot. Some of us received is when we quit our jobs to start our own business, some of us received it along the way when we made some big investments or created a new product. I think it’s normal for those who aren’t in business to dish out the most doubt. It can be very toxic to our ideas and overall mentality. But what do you do when you just know in your gut if an idea is really worth while but everyone says no?

Avoid discussing it – when someone is always negative and you can’t avoid them, sometimes the best way is just to not bring it up at all.

Find those who do understand – it is much better to talk to those who are or were in the same boat and often they have good ideas and advise for you too. Makes the journey less painful.

Focus on the end result

Research, research, research – if you have a gut feeling but don’t have any evidence to substantiate the feeling that may not be so good. But if you can point to some evidence or get feedback from people who really are your target, that this is something people want, you’ll feel better. Not to mention, be a little more confident.

Be prepared for it to fail – some gut feelings are right on target but a lot of them aren’t. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of failure and miscalculation. Everybody fails – even big companies like Google have some not-so-successful projects they have to cut off. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it and nothing to feel ashamed about. Yet, we can often be our harshest critic so prepare your own heart and mind. Be ready to pick up the pieces and move on.

Just go already! – That’s the whole idea behind a gut feeling right? That you just know it. The longer you wait, the more you’ll talk yourself out of it. Also, someone might come along and actually implement your idea. You’ll definitely feel worse about it then. If you tried it and it worked then great, if you tried it and didn’t work now you know what not to do.

Which means you have to do it yourself. If your database is over 2MB or even 10MB, you will have a hard time restoring it at your new host. That’s where this free tool BigDump comes in. It lets you import very large databases.

I’ve used it several times and each time has been a flawless experience. Just be warned that this is a little more technical than the stuff we cover regularly so if you’re lost that’s OK. However, if you are backed up against the wall with a big database to import, don’t mind reading some simple instructions and get your hands dirty, BigDump is the way to go.

Image files and even PDF’s should be uploaded in Binary format.

Like I said, 99% of the time, you won’t have to mess with this but sometimes when you upload an image and it looks all scrambled or cut off somehow, check the upload mode. Make sure it is in Binary or turn it back to Automatic and re-upload your image again.

That should take care of the problem.

This week we’re Sparking an Idea About Homepreneur Health

Summer time makes it so super hard for me to stay on top of my workout schedule. This is because during school days, I have about an hour to get myself psyched up before I get started with work and the day is still early.

Unfortunately, during the summer time, I also sleep in with the kids so the workout schedule is completely off kilter. Yeah it is such a challenge to get motivated. I’ve tried to schedule evening workouts too but that completely fell flat and never once did I get the chance. I guess there’s a lot more going on during the evening. Catching up with the family, cooking, getting the home work done, making sure kids are washed and in bed. Mornings still work out best for me.

But besides working out, what we put in or not put in, I’ve learned is also super important. No matter what, I try not to skip breakfast. It is really amazing how big a difference just a small bowl of cereal, a serving of protein like yogurt or stick cheese and a fruit can do to fuel you up. If I have my breakfast, I think clearer, work faster, am able to focus more and get a lot more done by noon, and I am not hungry all the time. If I don’t, I’m unorganized, lack energy, just outright distracted and feel like I have to forage for food all the time which of course disrupts the task at hand.

Back to exercise, I am kinda glad that the kids will be back in school in over a week. There is one other thing I want to try though. I’ve heard that standing uses more calories than sitting and so, when I re-arrange my office next, I am looking into creating a standing work space or waist-high work station so that I can stand for short periods or pull up a stool for longer periods.

Stool – sound uncomfortable right? Yes but maybe that might help me unplug and keep me from staying on the computer for unnecessarily long periods of time.

A favorite reason of mine to convert – so I can watch the video content I purchased or downloaded from membership sites on my phone, away from the computer. Love it.

The down side is, finding the download file for Super can be – let’s just say challenging and their web site is not the easiest to navigate to say the least. Unfortunately, I cannot link to the download file directly so I am going to direct you to the closest download page I can. The download link is small and easily missed towards the bottom of the page. Hint: hover your mouse over the link to make sure it is a .exe or lookout for “Download Super Setup file”,