This is a great tool for any startup on a shoestring. One of my first startups, I felt like I lived on conference calls and this would have been invaluable. It’s nice to know there are a few business tools still free on the Internet.

For more information check out tutsplus and if your a drupal fanatic like me be sure to grab the 960 grid system for Drupal. It offers a great alternative way to go from photoshop mockup to tangible drupal layout.

What is a small business to do in a recovery that appears to be stalling?

There are a few key indicators to examine when trying to spot a macro-economic trend for this recovery. First lets take a look at the unemployment and Jobless claims.

Source: US Dept. of Labor

Source: US Dept of Labor

Realizing the consumer confidence is directly tied to employment and how much “cash” is in any one persons pocket, we need to examine equity and net worth.

This is actually a ray of sunshine because as the graph indicates, we’re off our 2007 lows. According to NAR’sDanielle Hale, Research Economist, we actually gained back $6 trillion of the $16 trillion decline, which is a good beginning.

The last indicator that relates to consumer confidence is retail sales and although we are up 16% from the bottom of 2009, we’ve recently had a month over month dip from May 2009 to May 2010. This will continue to mirror the consumer confidence index as an indicator of where consumers feel the economy is going. Hopefully we provided a few key indicators of how to analyze and trend the macro economy in the United States…let’s recap briefly:

Consumer confidence index
Jobless claims and unemployment data
Existing and pending home sales
Retail Sales

You also can dive into:
Durable goods and interest rate spreads, but we will save these indicators for another time.

As Facebook becomes more of social platform to the web at large more ancillary revenue streams will develop like game revenue and even profit sharing models made famous by Google adsense. The company continues to reinvest profit into the platform and focuses on user needs.

Facebook beefed up it’s tool bag by acquiring several startups over the past few years. ShareGrove, Divvyshot and Octazen Solutions were all acquisitions acquired in the first part of 2010 alone.

1. Be Honest and Be Transparent.
Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not when marketing your blog or follow A+ bloggers in your industry for the sake of following them. The key is to differentiate yourself from the noise with compelling content. Give a reason for people to follow your blog via RSS, twitter and facebook. What makes your blog so different than the other 5000 blogs in your vertical? If you can address that question then you may become an A+ blogger yourself.

2. Be on target.
You owe it to your readership to be on target with your content. Granted I’m a bit of a hypocrite because StartupAddict has the luxury of being industry agnostic (due to being addicted), luckily most readers understand that. Use Google Analytics to hone in on keywords your audience uses to get to your blog and build on that foundation. This may sound trivial, but there is nothing more powerful in SEO than finding the power of long tail effective keywords. However, be careful not to keyword stuff or over use a term especially at the expense of your brand.

3. Optimize your blog for Search Engines
Google keyword tool or wordtracker provide insights into high volume search terms with low relative competition for that keyword term. Optimize your blog posts accordingly, but not at the expense of human readability. The simple SEO 101 tactic is to ensure you H1 or title tag is consistent with your keyword term and the alt/anchor tags.

4. Quality Link Building –
Everyone knows that link building can significantly boost SEO efforts. Be sure to focus on quality link building from relevant sources rather than quantity. Posting to 300 non relevant or spam directories will not get you very far compared to one quality inbound site with a Page rank of 4 or 5.

5. Post as a guest blogger
Find the best blogs you can within your niche and submit guest posts to them. For instance, StartupAddict.com is a “B” rated blog for entrepreneurship, startups, technology and Venture Capital news. If you have a blog about small or home business ideas this would be a great venue. You may not make it on entrepreneur.com but you need to put yourself out there. If you get use to rejection, you will have more links than you can handle back to your site. Make sure your content is interesting and sticky enough that a user will bookmark it or spread via social media.

An impressive display of linking building and a reminder we all need to continually focus on Search Engine Optimization efforts as well as looking for quality authoritative inbound links to assist out link building campaign.

Phone Droid

Purchase Motorola DROID A855 Android Phone (Only $19.99)

4 great tips to get you up and running on the Droid:

1. Droid outlook Sync

Blackberry users wondering how to sync their phone Droid with outlook and preserve all the outlook features like tasks, notes, calender, contacts should test out the DejaOffice app by companion link. You can get a 14-day trial to see if the app is a fit before spending the $39.00 to buy it. Download the USB product version from the companion link site and then download the DejaOffice app on your actually droid phone from Android marketplace. This has been an absolute life-save migrating years of outlook data to an opensource phone like Droid. The really beautiful feature is Dejaoffice will place contacts and calender events into the default “contact” and “calender” apps which also keeps your Google calender up to date. Having the Google Calender up to date is nice if you forgot your Droid and were on another computer.

2. General Email on Droid

If you’re an avid Gmail user and do not use outlook then the previous tip may be useless for you. In addition, you may be perfectly happy with the default email program provided by Google on the Droid and life is good. For the rest of us, we will need to make a few more adjustments to how email is handled. If you stay with the default program do not expect the solid and reliable “push” technology that blackberry provides. The default email program will pull emails when you have the application loaded (less than desirable). You may also find that you are not getting all the emails on your phone droid, especially if you have an office computer fighting for the same emails. Both of these solutions can be fixed easily. For a more robust email client download the K9 email app for free. This will simulate the push technology the blackberry has and give proper notification in the Droid task bar. It is not quigo into your options menu on your email desktop client (outlook, mozilla thuderbird, entourage) and verify you are leaving a copy on the server.

3. Reboot the Droid

This seems basic I’m sure, but rebooting is a healthy thing when the Droid is on the fritz or having bloat from multi-tasking too many apps. Alt-shift-del. You can also hold the power button for about 3 seconds and power down the Droid.

4. Task Manager App

This free little app will save you a lot of headache and battery life when you have too many apps open at once. The multi-tasking ability of the Motorola phone Droid is definitely a strength, but also a weakness if don’t wrangle your open applications. This app will allow you to deep-six everything at once except that few essential programs you may want to keep open. Again, this is critical for a getting a full day of productivity from the battery on the Droid.