I don’t have a second monitor.  I could have printed out one file for reference, but I really don’t like to waste paper.  What I do have, however, is a number of other devices for website testing.  A short search led me to Air Display, an app that turns an iPad or other iDevice into a second screen.

I purchased the app ($9.99 from the iTunes store) and installed it on my iPad.  Downloaded the Windows software for my laptop (the software is also, of course, available for Mac) and installed it.  Opened the app on the iPad, synced the two screens, pulled one file over to the iPad, and voila! a quick, easy-to-use, inexpensive dual-monitor setup.

A nice bonus?  It took me about 10 minutes to realize that I could run the mouse cursor over to the iPad and use the mouse there too.  Or if I wanted to go the other way, I could use the touch screen on the iPad to control the cursor on my laptop.  Too cool!

The one downside that I found was that Air Display keeps the iPad display on at all times, which does eat into battery life.  Just be aware of that and prepare to plug it in when necessary.

If you have occasionally need of two screens but don’t want to spring for a second monitor, Air Display is well worth checking out.  It made my work day go much faster — and no printouts to recycle!

February 10 marked the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Water Snake.  Although snakes have a bad reputation in most western cultures, in the Chinese system they are harbingers of good luck.  “A person who has a snake lviing under his house will never lack for food,” says the tradition.

2013 will be a good year for business, careers, and wealth-building.  As a snake sheds its skin and is reborn, this year will mark a turning point of rejuvenation and renewal.

Here’s to prosperity and good fortune for you and your business throughout the coming year!

3 Ways to Set your Business on Fire

One of the best ways to increase your business is by word of mouth.  But how do you get people talking about you in a way that creates new prospects, new customers, new business?

Shannon Willoby offers 4 Easy Ways to Get Your Customers Talking About You, focusing on ways to get your existing customers to refer you to their friends and contacts.

You can’t depend totally on existing customers, though, especially if your business is small or just getting started.  Geoffrey James builds on Willoby’s ideas with an article on Inc.com: How to Build a Network of Contacts.  Not just advice to “go out and network,” James suggests groups of people who will actively refer your business to others, as well as ways to reach out and ask for their help.

And one last – unexpected – source for help to grow your business:  How about your competitors?  Andreea Ayers of LaunchGrowJoy.com advises several methods in How to use competitors to grow your business.  The steps she outlines are smple, effective, and best of all, can be automated to bring you information on ways you may not be considering to serve your customers.

5 WordPress Security Threats You Probably Didn’t Know About

WordPress now powers about one in four websites on the Internet – more than 61 million at last count.   That means that WordPress-powered sites now present a big target for hackers.  Keeping your site secure starts with making certain that your WordPress core files, plugins, and themes are all up to date, and removing any plugins or themes that are not being used.

Tom Ewer adds good information in his article 5 WordPress Security Threats You Probably Don’t Know About.  If your site runs on WordPress, take a minute to check his list and look at your own dashboard for vulnerabilities.

I found this nifty quiz from Mind Tools that helps identify where the problem areas lie in time management skills.  It breaks down which skills need improvement and suggests tools and resources to help address those particular issues.

It’s completely free and doesn’t even ask for an email address in return. Give it a try! You may find some useful information.

How Good is Your Time Management? Discover time management tools that can help you.

Try these two WordPress plugins to help:

Facebook Like Send & Open Graph Meta adds Facebook Like and Send buttons at the base of each post on your website to make it easy for visitors to link your post on their Facebook timeline. It also adds meta information behind the scenes to tell Facebook which image to use when it grabs that link for display.

If you often post videos to your blog, you might prefer Fedmich’s Facebook Open Graph Meta. It doesn’t add the buttons to your site, but it includes a neat trick for video: the image on the Facebook excerpt is a clickable link to the video itself.

Biz Tips: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Cash Flow Now

Although geared primarily toward freelancers, this article contains a lot of generally useful information on improving cash flow. (And who couldn’t use that right about now?)

Note: This site was having some issues this morning. If the page hangs, wait a minute and try again.

5 Easy Ways to Improve Cash Flow Now

2012 brought a huge number of changes for me personally and for 2FishWeb. 2013 is shaping up to be really exciting. I can’t wait to share all the great changes with you.

Moving forward into 2013, I’ll be making weekly postings with a quick business or website tip and maybe a link to an article or two that I thought you might find interesting.

Biz Tips: Update your business info

- Check your website footer: Does the copyright date need to be changed to 2013? Make sure to change it, or (if you are hosted with 2FishWeb) send an email and I’ll make sure it’s done for you.

- The first of the year is a great time to update your bio and About page, too. Got a new head shot? Make sure to show it off! While you’re at it, don’t forget to update your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media sites.
Sprint, not Marathon.

Let’s Get Moving

If you’re like most business owners (and me!), you go into your office in the morning, sit and work until lunchtime, eat quickly and get back to it all afternoon.

The human body was built to move. Try this instead and see if your productivity takes a jump: Set a timer for 60 to 90 minutes. Sit down, concentrate, and really work until the timer goes off. Then get up. Stretch. Take a walk, get a drink of water, move around for maybe 15 minutes. Go back to your work refreshed and ready to tackle the next segment of the day.

Try this for a week. I am. Next Monday we’ll compare notes and see how well it worked!
Events

Last week I noticed that the end-of-April shipment was overdue. I checked the UPS tracking number on my order status, to find out that it had been delivered April 30. “Left in garage,” it said.

Um… not my garage! Well, these things happen from time to time. We probably had a new driver on the route who got our address confused with another that’s very similar. (We swap mail frequently, those other homeowners and I.) But this time they didn’t have it.

I went to the pet store for an emergency supply and emailed Pet Food Direct that my shipment was feeding someone else’s fortunate pooches. They immediately sent a replacement order and said they would file an inquiry with UPS. The second shipment came, my doggie girls were fat and happy, and all was well in the world.

Usual procedure in customer service, right?

The extraordinary part comes next.

Last Saturday another neighbor brought the box over. The original shipment that had been left in his garage on April 30.

Oh, dear.

I emailed Pet Food Direct. (It was Saturday — I didn’t expect that anyone would be manning the phones and a reply on Monday would be fine). I explained what had happened, told them I would keep both shipments, but of course I needed to pay for the second one and could they please charge my card on file in my account?

In just a few minutes I had this response by email:

Thank you so very much for being such an upstanding & honest individual. I have spoken with my supervisor & please do keep the food. We will NOT be charging any additional amount to your account. Please keep the extra shipment with our compliments.

I was stunned.

They thanked me for doing what was simply the right thing? They were surprised that I planned to pay for both shipments? And then they gave me the better part of $75 in merchandise for doing that?

This is how you do customer service.

Pet Food Direct has a loyal customer as long as I have dogs.

What to do?

Jeff Starr of Perishable Press suggests adding the most common Cyrillic characters to your comment moderation file.

If you expect to get comments from visitors writing in other languages, of course, this might not be a good idea. But for normal blogging activity, especially if you prefer to leave comments open indefinitely, take a look at Jeff’s article and consider implementing his suggestions.

um... what?

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a mysterious billboard and why, after some thought, I realized that sometimes “What??” is exactly the response you want.

After I wrote that post, I considered calling the people who had bought the billboard ad and asking them — did it work? Did you get the website traffic, physical visitors, and increased sales you wanted from the mysterious billboard? What were your results?

Then I realized that they have no way of knowing those answers.

There’s no way to track who saw the billboard and typed in the URL they read. No way to distinguish them from site visitors who found them through Google, or picked up a business card or brochure, or talked to someone on the phone.

A billboard that size on a major north-south interstate costs roughly $2000 per month. That’s a huge investment in advertising to make without some means of knowing that it’s working. That’s what I meant by “someone was half clever;” they realized that the mystery would create curiosity and increase their website visitors (and hopefully also physical visitors who would engage with them), but they failed to set up a way to track results.

How they could have measured

I would have set up a separate landing page, something like TheirDomainName.com/who, with traffic from the billboard going directly to that page. That would give me good statistics. How many people typed in that URL will show up in analytics reporting as “traffic source: direct.” Those people, and only those people, saw the billboard and were moved to follow up on their curiosity by opening the URL in a browser..

On that landing page, I might have put a special offer that you could only get if you called and said “I saw it on the billboard.” It might even be possible to set up a separate phone number on that landing page, so that calls to that number must have come from the billboard. This would give the company a clear way to track the effectiveness of their advertising dollars.

Use your web-based tools to full advantage.

Set up separate landing pages linking to dedicated email addresses or phone numbers. Track your statistics and measure the results — that’s the only way to find out what’s working and what isn’t.

Or… pay $25,000 a year to a billboard company and hope for the best.

Last November, the Postal Service announced that they were going to raise rates on January 22, 2012, add a number of new service classes to Priority Mail and change up the parcel classes. I knew from similar experiences in 2009 and 2010 that this would break the shipping module and shut down her shopping cart until the software company fixed it.

In mid-December I sent an inquiry to the software company explaining this potential problem, reminding them what happened the last two times, and asking if they would have a patch for the shipping prior to January 22. The company rep responded that “it would update itself” and there was no need to worry.

I was not so sure.

I ran reports on the customer’s transactions for the previous six months, calculated what her average shipping was as percentage of the total order cost, and suggested that we temporarily change it from real-time calculation to percentage of order until the modules could be patched. She agreed it was a good idea. I made the change on January 21.

On January 22, the shipping module broke because of all the new service classes, just as I had predicted. The shopping cart software support forum went completely haywire with panicked people whose shopping carts suddenly would not work, while my client sailed smoothly through. It took a week for the patches to be posted. I patched and turned real-time back on, and she didn’t lose a single sale or have a single confused customer. It even worked well on international shipments.

Proactive customer service: one of our specialties at 2FishWeb.

How can we help you before your next problem strikes?

Yesterday this Tweet from Steve Plunkett in my stream caught my attention. At first glance, I wasn’t sure why, but I’ve learned to heed these nags — it means my subconscious is poking me. “Hey! Here’s something you need to know!”

At first glance, this implies that running at 90 miles per hour with a roadmap in mind is normal, that it’s desirable, that everyone should be doing it. Following the analogy, though: where can you run 90 miles per hour? In a speedboat on open water… in a racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats… in a fast car on a major highway where the land is wide open and there are no speed limits and no obstacles.

Either no obstructions, or else you are running wide open on a highway paved by someone else, going to the destination they have chosen.

Aha.

I’ve seen this happen with many colleagues and coworkers. “I’m working as hard as I can! I’m doing everything I know how to do, but I’ll never get anywhere! Progress is sooooooo sloooooooow.”

Despair. Angst. Feeling like giving up, that the Brilliant Idea you are chasing is never going to work and success will never be achievable. Crawling through a jungle instead of running at 90 miles an hour. Feeling your way through the thicket without a roadmap… or even a compass to tell you whether you’re headed in the right direction.

Maybe you’re going slowly not because you are doing anything “wrong,” but because you’re breaking trail.

You’re not hauling ass on someone else’s yellow-highlighter highway to a destination they chose for you. You’re going where you need to go. Exploring. Creating an entirely new road with a destination that’s right for you. Or building a trail in the spirit of discovery. Who knows where it might lead? Someplace much more magical than someone else’s pre-determined goal, I bet.

Either way, it’s an act of creation, an act of faith.

Go slowly. Carve your own path through the wilderness.

No one else can do this other than you.