Using a Gmail Account these days, is commonplace.  Now everyone of us have it!  Do you know some really cool ways to better manage your emails, with Gmail?  Read on to know them.  All Simple but effective!

Canned Responses

A Labs feature, that helps you save and reuse the content of mails.  In the feature description they term it as something for the lazy – but believe me, it is highly effective for everyone if used well. 

I generally use Canned responses for – some thanking emails and project proposals. It saves a lot of time, when used for some regularly repeated content.

How to use: Click on the   (labs) icon at the top navigation on your Gmail Account and Enable “Canned Responses”

Labels and Filters

One of the most powerful features of Gmail, that helps you organize emails in a systematic way.  You can choose to use Labels in either of the following ways:

• Select One or More messages and apply Labels
• Create a Filter to automatically apply Labels on new messages (based on some criteria)

When creating Filters you can choose to do the following for better results:

• Skip Inbox – messages won’t appear in Inbox but only under the labels.  This helps in preventing the loss of important mails
• Apply the Label
• Send Canned Response (automatically sends a Canned response, but use with caution for unintended responses!)

How to use: Click on the (create filter link) next to the Search Box at the top, to create a Filter.  Select one or more messages and use button to apply existing labels or create a New one

Forgotten Attachment

How many times have you missed an important attachment with your mail?  Never do it again, with the Forgotten Attachment Labs feature.

Using the keywords in the mail about attachments, this feature prompts you to attach files if you have missed them.  So simple, but very useful.

How to use: Click on the   (labs) icon at the top navigation on your Gmail Account and Enable “Forgotten Attachment Detector”

Forwarding Emails to other Accounts

You wish to have all or some of your Gmail emails in to another account.  No problems!  You can very easily do that.

Also you can Create Filters that forwards only certain emails, based on the keywords you specify.  So this way, not all emails but only specific ones are forwarded.

How to use: Click on the (create filter link) next to the Search Box at the top, to create a Filter, for forwarding mails.  To Forward all mails – Go to Settings and click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”

Search Auto Complete

For all those frequent email searchers, this Labs feature works like magic.  You can type in some keywords on the Search box – contact name or email– and the auto-completer brings them on.

Very useful to search for mails to and from some particular contacts. 

How to use: Click on the   (labs) icon at the top navigation on your Gmail Account and Enable “Search Autocomplete”

Vacation Auto-Responder

Planned your vacations?  Now you can use this Google Labs feature to automatically enable Auto-Responder, by giving your vacation dates.

This makes sure that you never forget again to enable Auto-Responder, when you are off Gmail.

How to use: Click on the   (labs) icon at the top navigation on your Gmail Account and Enable “Vacation Time!”

You know of even better ways to use Gmail.  Share them as comments to this post! I would love to hear them.

If you are an RSS freak and looking to get Twitter content that has links in them, into your RSS Reader, then Readtwit is the right tool for you.  Read on to know why should you definitely try Readtwit!

What is Readtwit?

Readtwit is a Twitter-based tool that parses your Twitter feed and provides it in RSS format.  It takes only those tweets with links in them, extracts the initial content (about 2000 characters) and feeds the RSS stream.  You can subscribe to this unique RSS stream created for you in the RSS Reader of choice and start reading stuff!

Why is it Good?

I find it good for a few of the reasons:

• I can see the initial content of the links shared via Twitter, without actually clicking on them
• This helps me decide whether to follow the link or skip it right away!
• If Gears is enabled with Google Reader, then Twitter content can be read even offline!
• Since I am “Google Reader Share” freak – I find it pretty damn easy to share Twitter content on Google Reader
• I can also choose to ignore certain #hashtags or @users while creating the feeds (by telling Readtwit of course!)

How does the feed look like?

As mentioned, Readtwit doesn’t parse the complete content of the target URL from the tweet.  So, the feed is partial with a link to continue reading.  Here is how the feed looks in my Google Reader:

Issues?

Since Readtwit is pretty much just starting up, there are a few problems too.  Not all shortened links are parsed for content.  For example, I noticed http://su.pr links are not parsed and instead navigation links on Stumbleupon page gets displayed.

Also, I found a few links on my Twitter home page, that are missing in the Readtwit RSS feed.

But overall, I found it pretty good to use and yet another reason to stick with my RSS Reader!

Try it out and let me know how it goes…

Email still continues to be one of the widest used and easier to learn tool around the web.  In this post, I will show some ways to use your email with social networking tools.

1. Posterous

Posterous is a very powerful tool to post things using Email.  It is very simple to get started:

• Sign up with Posterous with your Email (you can even skip this step!)
• Setup your Posterous account which is accessible at http://yourusername.posterous.com
• Send your content as Email to post@posterous.com from your registered account
• Your content appears magically at http://yourusername.posterous.com

You can also send in an attachment with your email, that are added to your blog post.

Also, you can associate other social media accounts with your Posterous – like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Wordpress Blog etc., – and the contents posted to Posterous are automatically pushed to these accounts.

They have a wonderful FAQ page and you will never need another documentation.

2.  NutshellMail

NutshellMail is a tool where you configure social networking accounts of your choice and it sends you a daily summary mail (you can set the frequency) with all the updates.

This is especially good, if you don’t have time to keep up with all your social networking accounts.  You can receive all the updates and key information, right into your inbox.

Check out my earlier post on NutshellMail to know more about their services.

3.  TwitterMail

I think the name says it all!  Once you register your Twitter account with TwitterMail, a secret email address gets generated just for you.  Any mails you send to this email address are posted as updates to your Twitter Account.

Other notable features of this service include:

• Send photos to Twitter (uses TwitPic)
• New replies sent to your mail, once in 2 days
• Send a message with ‘Friends’ as subject and you receive the latest 20 updates from them
• Scheduled Tweets

4.  WiseStamp

WiseStamp is essentially a way to create attractive email signatures.  The most important feature is the way to associate your Social networking accounts with your email signatures.  This is an excellent marketing tactic for all your social networks!

You can further do the following with WiseStamp:

• Attach your latest Tweet with your Signature
• Add any RSS feed (e.g., your blog) with your Signature
• Use multiple signatures
• Add your logo with the Signature
• … and so on

Check out some cool signature examples created with WiseStamp.

Do you know of any other ways to use your Email with Social Networking tools?  Shoot them as comments to this post.  I would also love to hear your feedback on this post.

I have many blog posts in my archives, that are good to read but unfortunately failed without any visits.  I am sure you too have a few of them, that were deprived of attention they deserve.  So are they really dead?  What can you do with such posts?

Revisit and “Polish” Old Blog Posts

I do this activity every week.  Following is a brief list of sub-activities, but make sure to tweak them based on your blog and niche.

• Pick up about 3-5 posts from your Archive, every week
• Make sure to select the ones you consider “good enough” for promotion
• Also consider if they are still relevant to the current market in your niche (Who would want to read What is Twitter? eh!)
• Tweak the Headline, Content and Grammar, if they are too naive (At least, you wrote them when you were naive!)
• Update the Post.  Add any attractive images that might make them spicy! 
• Maintain a list of such Posts – which are eligible and ready for promotion

Let’s call this list a – Gem List.

Showcase them on the Home Page of your Blog

Showcase a couple of posts from the Gem List – on the Home Page of your Blog.  Invariably, Home Page is something that garners the maximum attention.  You can choose one of these locations, to position these gems of yours.

• Top of Content and Sidebars (after your header)
• Top of Sidebars (as a widget with bulleted list)
• At the bottom of your Recent Post

It becomes a lot easier with Thesis using the following hooks:

• thesis_hook_after_header or Feature Box (Top of Content and Sidebars)
• thesis_hook_before_sidebars or thesis_hook_before_sidebar_1 (Top of Sidebars)
• thesis_hook_after_post or thesis_hook_after_post_box (At the bottom of your Recent Post)

If you are new to Thesis, you can use this excellent article by Sugarrae to get started with Hooks.

But the point here is to showcase the best of your work to the visitors and start driving traffic.

Tweet about them

I am sure you must have gained at least 1000 more followers, since the time you wrote the post.  They might be dying to get updates from you!! Why not make them visitors of your Blog?

So Tweet your Gem List, that you have come up for the week.  Make sure to remove the Archives or some unwanted text that goes along with the tweet.  The best solution is to “hand code” the tweet like – Post Title and Bit.ly link.  I personally use Bit.ly, as it becomes a lot easier to track the statistics.  (I am sure you are shouting a few other URL shorteners, but Bit.ly tops my list!)

You can check the Statistics of a Bit.ly link as – http://bit.ly/info/alphanumcode. Also, use meaningful hashtags with your Tweet like #thesis, #wordpress etc. to attract targeted readers

Use them in your Newsletter

If you are already publishing a Newsletter for your Blog and there are a handful of readers on the list, then I would strongly recommend to include your Gem List Posts on it.

Market them appropriately on your Newsletter, so as to entice the user to click on the link and start reading your post.  Otherwise, you can choose to include the entire post in your Newsletter, but I strongly recommend setting the context and linking back to your Blog.

Share them using some Social Tools

Bookmark on Delicious.  Digg Them.  Share on Reddit.  Save on StumbleUpon.

I am sure you can reach a huge audience, using these Social Tools.  Don’t be shy in sharing your own posts.  Make sure the topic targets a reasonable number of audience and share it using the Social Tools of your choice.    Again, take care of the Post names – remove unwanted text from it before posting.

What do you do with your Blog Posts that died?  How do you Promote such Posts and start driving Traffic?  As usual, share your thoughts and ideas as comments to this post.  I am dying to hear them!  Subscribe to Thoughts Unlimited for more such killers!

Photo Credit: dave_7

Affiliate Marketing is one of main sources of income for Professional bloggers.  If Affiliate Marketing is a jargon to you, I would recommend the following sources of knowledge to learn more about it – What is Affiliate Marketing? (by Problogger) and Make Money Online eBook by John Chow.  But unfortunately, many Bloggers fail with Affiliate Marketing.  Why?  What can you do to start making money from Affiliate Marketing?

1.  Choose Products in the Niche of your Blog

This is one of the mistakes that many Bloggers make – not choosing the right products that falls in the niche or the topic of your Blog.  Just because an affiliate program gives you a huge percentage in commission, is not a criteria to promote it through your Blog.  Choose products wisely and see if it is really worth the promotion.

Though not possible in some cases – it works well if you first try out the product before promoting.  This helps you examine the quality and also to find out if it falls in your niche.

2.  Be Passionate about the Products

You never sell anything, if you are not passionate about the product.  Though you have not created the product, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be passionate.  Whenever you promote them through your blog, explain in your own words as to why someone should buy it.  Here, put your passion into words.  If possible – give instances on how the product helped you with something.  I have seen this approach work well many times.

3.  Do some Pre-Selling

Once you are passionate about the product, do some amount of Pre-Selling.  Pre-Selling takes many forms – describe the products in your own words, market them across all your sites, highlight the gains of products, etc.  If possible, work together with the product seller (if it is a small product) and find out his/her favorite ways of pre-selling the product.  Help the seller pre-sell the product through the preferred channels and make sales out of it.

4.  Positioning of Advertising Banners and Text

Positioning of Advertising Banners and Text shows a lot about your passion for the product.  Don’t position them in places that are irrelevant or not clearly visible to the visitor.  This way, you can lose a huge percentage of sales.  Some of the possible positions of Ads are:

• Header of the Page
• Top of the Sidebar
• Top of the Content Area
• After Post Content
• RSS Feeds

Position them wisely and wait for readers to buy them!

5.  Promote the Products

This is one of the most efficient ways of marketing your Affiliate products – but it works only if you have tried out the product and are so passionate about it.

Promote the Products by writing reviews or feedback, through one of the following channels:

• Write a Blog Post reviewing the product
• Promote via Twitter (don’t make it look like a spam!)
• A Page on Blog reviewing and promoting the product

Do you use Affiliate Marketing to make money?  If yes, what are your success tips?  How do you use Affiliate Marketing to make money?  I would love to hear them all – share them as comments to this post.  Your discussions encourage me to write more such useful posts!

I know what you are thinking.  This topic has been debated around the blogosphere, for a while now.  Why another post?  Because, still I find many Twitter users don’t make the full use of a powerful platform.  This post is a collection of “straight to the point” tips on making your Twitter life better.

1.  Choose the right Twitter Name

If you are into Consulting Business, how would it sound if your Twitter name is @playboyhere? Ridiculous, right!  But, I still find many of my followers have unrelated and tongue-twisting names.

If you are into a Business and using Twitter as a Marketing tool – better use your Business Name.  Otherwise, a Brand Name or a Personal Name (for personal accounts) should do in most cases.  Avoid using awkward and irrelevant names which might drive followers to unsubscribe!

2.  Create a Professional Twitter Background

Default backgrounds that Twitter provide is good in most cases.  But if you are trying to Market or build a Brand, I would suggest going for a professional Background.

Check out this excellent “Mashup” post from Mashable on different Twitter Background creation options.  I personally prefer the Free Twitter Designer online tool to design attractive images.

Always, I can help you with Background design at costs as low as $5!  Contact me here

3.  Use Your Photo or Business Logo as the Profile picture (No Obscenity!)

I think the title conveys the message.  Use a pleasing photo of either yourself or your Business logo.  This goes a long way in building a brand around you or the Business.  When readers visit the Blog or Website with the same picture, they can correlate things better.

For that matter of fact, I would recommend using the same picture or “gravatar” across all social tools to better Brand building.

4.  Take care while writing your Bio

Twitter lets you use 160 characters for the Bio.  Make the best use of it.  Write something relevant about you or the Business.  It should be crisp but convey the relevant message.

Simple but not crunchy

We help you to manage the finances effectively with the help of best-in-class managers and accountants

Better usage of words and terse

We manage your Finances like a Pro with a best-in-class Team

5.  Follow people Wisely

A higher number of Followers and the people you follow, doesn’t really matter if you or your Business brand don’t go up.  If the number of Followers really fascinate you – use Twitter Search and tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck etc. to group the followers.  This helps in grasping the important messages and don’t lose them in the ocean.

6.  Retweet and Promote People.  They in turn help you!

Retweeting is a simple mechanism to promote messages sent by others.  It could be a product or idea they are trying to promote, a help needed or an important message to be spread around.  In any case, if you find it real and not-spammy, retweet it to your followers.  This can have positive impacts on your brand too!

This covers most of the essential basics with Twitter Usage.  What do you think are the best practices with Twitter?  Shoot your thoughts as comments.  I can also help you with Twitter Strategies.  Feel free to get in touch.

Photo Credit: respres

Do you love to update or access Twitter over the web?  Are you a Firefox moron?  Then, grab the Power Twitter add-on, as it wonderfully enhances your Web Twitter experience.

Install Power Twitter

Power Twitter is a Firefox add-on and it works with Firefox versions 1.5 – 3.5.  The current version as on 11 August 2009, is 1.32.

Installation is straight forward and you should see Power Twitter in action on restarting the browser and visiting http://twitter.com

Retweet from the Web

A major drawback with the Web version of Twitter is the lack of inherent Retweet (RT) support.  Power Twitter helps you to retweet messages right from the web.

View URL Previews, even the Shortened Ones!

You can view the Page Title and the favicon of the target pages, even if only the shortened URL is available in the status update.  This helps you decide, whether to follow the link to the page or not.

Retweet and View URL Title from Twitter Web

Hover over the Users and see their Latest Updates

You can hover over the “following” list on the Twitter home page and all their latest updates “pop” like magic.  This is really helpful if you don’t wish to search for updates from people who matter.

Hover over the People you follow and see all their latest updates

Shorten URL when you post an update

Another good thing about Power Twitter is that, it lets you Shorten the URL when you post an update.  This is another feature missing in the Twitter Web.  Comes in handy, if you post a lot of URL to Twitter.

View Images and Videos right on Twitter

If the URL posted on Twitter resolves to an image or an Online Video, then you can view them right on the Twitter page.  This is my favorite feature of Power Twitter!  I have not checked how it works with Vimeo etc.  But it is good to go with YouTube!

So, I hope most of these features appeal to you, if you are a Power Twitter user.  It’s time to grab the add-on and let me know how you like it!

Going through a post in Mashable, I noticed this cute little Twitter gadget that shows the number of times the item has been “tweeted”.

But another cool part is that – it offers you to “Retweet” it right away by giving a link just below the count.  If you are not a Twitter geek and wondering what “Retweet” is all about – you can find a nice post here on what is Retweet and how to do it.

I sometimes wonder, why the web version of “Twitter” doesn’t provide an option to Retweet?  It just allows you to Reply to a message or send a Direct message to someone on Twitter.

Much has been talked on getting more followers, retaining your followers and blah, blah, blah… But in this post, you will find ways to locate people on Twitter, who are worthy following.  I prefer to call them your Leaders (in a linguistic sense) on Twitter, whom you choose to follow!!  Because who you follow, determines what you gain out of Twitter.

Start with the “Twitter Power 150” list

Twitterrank is a service that ranks almost all twitter users, based on a few vital parameters.  Since this post is not about Twitterrank anyway, you can jump to their FAQ section on how this really works.

With inputs from Twitterrank and Dapper, Advertising Age came up with the list of top 150 Twitter Users.  They are ones with popular blogs, focusing on advertising and marketing.

You can access the Twitter Power 150 List here – http://www.twitterpower150.com/

Here is a snapshot of the first 20 in the list and you must already see some big names there…

To go a step further, you can jump in to the Advertising Age Power 150 page here – http://adage.com/power150/

Here you can find the complete list of Power bloggers, their rankings on Google, Alexa etc. and links to their websites or blogs. 

I am sure most of them must be on Twitter and this is another way to find your Leaders on Twitter.

Digg through “Shorty Awards Finalists and Nominees”

Shorty Awards is all about recognizing the best content producers on Twitter, for the year 2008.  The finalists were shortlisted and the winners were chosen, purely on the votes given by their followers or readers.

To know more about the Awards, you can go right here – http://shortyawards.com/about/

On the Shorty Awards home page, you can find the list of finalists on a variety of categories.  Some categories to mention are – Advertising, Business, Education, Finance, Music, Politics, Tech, Travel etc.  This gives you an opportunity to choose people from the categories you are interested in.

Also, on choosing a particular category say Tech, you can browse through all nominees under this category.  So, here you have more people to follow!

Find those your Leaders follow

You chose the person, whom you are following on Twitter.  Why not use his Leaders list, to find suitable candidates for you to follow?  Nevertheless, the similarity of interests between you and your leader, must hold good for your leader and those he/she follows.

For instance, I chose to follow Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) on Twitter.  Kevin Rose follows about 140+ people on Twitter, some of whom can be my potential Leaders with similar interests!!

Peek at your RSS Subscriptions

You put in all your valuable effort to choose which Blogs/Websites to follow on RSS Readers.  Why not utilize this effort to choose whom to follow on Twitter?

I am pretty sure that many of the popular Bloggers are currently on Twitter.  And somehow I feel, those who post quality content on their Blogs, can repeat it on Twitter.

So make sure that you follow most of them on Twitter, whose posts you read or whose moves you watch!!

Hope you found this post useful!!  Feel free to add additional thoughts on this subject as comments.  I may choose to add them as updates to my post!!

Also, you can follow me on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/thotsunlimited

Do you surf the web a lot and love to post updates to Twitter on the run?  Then you must know the following browser-based tools because they make the job easy for you.

Friendbar (for Firefox)

Friendbar is by far the best browser-based Twitter tool I have come across.   But, the downside is its availability only for Firefox users.

You can install the addon from this location.

Once installed, this add-on creates a toolbar that stretches across the length of your browser window, just beneath the Bookmarks Toolbar.  In addition to Twitter, you can use Friendbar to post updates on your Facebook account.

You have an option to constantly preview the Twitter messages from those you follow, right on the Friendbar.  This is awesome because you get Twitter updates, just as you surf.  Once you decide to Twit on something, Friendbar has a prominent ‘Post’ button and also allows you to add a shortened URL of the current page.  Also you can Reply, Re-tweet or Send Direct Messages right from the Friendbar.

Twitthis (all browsers)

Twitthis is an easy way to send information on the web page you are reading, to all your Twitter followers.  Also, you can add Twitthis buttons on your web site or blog, for your readers to share it with their followers.

You can add the Twitthis bookmarklet on the Bookmarks Toolbar and Twit web pages on the run. 

Twitthis Bookmarklet (drag to your bookmarks toolbar)

Twshot (all browsers)

Twshot is another bookmarklet tool to post messages to Twitter. 

On clicking the bookmarklet, a popup window opens where you can post updates to Twitter.  You also have an option to add the URL of the current page and Twshot will help shorten it for you (to meet the 140 target !).

Twshot Bookmarklet (drag to your bookmarks toolbar)

Twitlet (all browsers)

Twitlet is a JavaScript bookmarklet tool to post updates to your Twitter account.

Once you give your Twitter Username and Password, Twitlet creates a bookmarklet which you can drag on to the bookmarks toolbar.

On clicking the bookmarklet, you get an alert like popup that is very minimal and easy to handle.  Also adding the URL of the current page to your tweet is optional.   You have to type in either #link or #this with your update, to include a “shortened version” of the current page URL. 

Hope you found these tools interesting… Now surf the web and tweet as you go !!