Freebie Friday is Retiring

If you’re a regular reader to this blog, you probably know that I have a daily theme on the blog. For example: Myth Crusher Monday, Tough Question Tuesday, Wednesday Words from You, etc.

Well you know what? Each Friday I struggle to find something to post. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have great freebies for you. Not at all. The problem is, I’m always finding and passing out freebies here that I can’t just limit it to Friday.

Here’s Some of the Free Stuff Already Posted this Past Week:

The Twinterviews: How Do You Use Twitter? - Free interview series from Alejandro Reyes.

Free Incoming Links for Women-Targeted Website - An opportunity to post content and do-follow comments on new and rapidly expanding women’s website.

PRWeb & MediaPost Tutorials - More step-by-step tutorials to help you distribute your press releases.

Custom Mini-Site Giveaway - This one is already over, but we have 2 similar giveaways coming very soon.

And that’s just this week. There’s new free stuff posted here ALL the time, so please join me in saying adios to Freebie Friday cuz freebies aren’t just for Friday’s anymore.

FREE: Triple Your Opt-In Rates - A Jimmy D. Brown Goodie

We all know Jimmy D. Brown produces nothing but great stuff, so you can’t go wrong when Friday’s Freebie comes direct from the man himself.

This time, it’s his free guide “Triple Your Opt-In Requests from the Same Amount of Traffic”

You’ve probably heard the phrase “leaving money on the table” and it’s amazing how many areas of our business where this can happen…and our opt-ins are no exception.

Jimmy’s free guide shows you a 3-step formula to getting more people on your list.

Click here to learn more and download it.

Then look forward to more opt-ins next week.

Revver.com - Distribute Your Vides / Publish Others

We’ve all heard of YouTube and they are, hands down, the biggest and most popular video-sharing site…but there are other options.

One of those options is Revver.

At Revver, you can load your own videos or take the code and publish other people’s videos, just like at YouTube.

There’s Earning Potential:

Revver also has a potential income earning component, where it displays ads with your videos and you get paid forimpressions and clicks (you share the profits with Revver 50/50). If you publish someone else’s video, you earn 20% of the ad revenue, then the rest is split between Revver and the video publisher.

Thoughts:

I am not sure what kind of exposure Revver offers to video publishers, but loading a video and trying it out is a fairly quick and simple process. As far as publishing other people’s videos, I’ve had a little trouble finding the content I want as YouTube definitely has a bigger selection to choose from.

To Learn More:

View a Revver video publishing tutorial.

Set up your Revver account.

Free Affiliate Commotion Handbook

If you have an affiliate program or are thinking about starting one…here’s a cool freebie. Angela Wills has put together a handbook called Affiliate Commotion and it shows you step-by-step how to set up a profitable affiliate program.

Angela is a VA specializing in affiliate management and makes it her business to pay attention to those little details that we sometimes miss.

In addition  to the handbook, you get instant access to 4 free interviews with affiliate managers (including yours truly). Grab yours for free here.

Moodle - Free Open Source Course Management

Here’s an interesting free program that one of my members introduced me to. It’s called Moodle. You can create highly interactive online courses with multiple instructors and students.

Some things you can specify:

-> A weekly or topic format. Or you can have courses in one main forum.

-> How long the course will take.

-> Course start date if you want it to start and end on a certain date.

-> Create hidden sections

-> Show grades to students

-> Show activity reports to students

-> Set whether or not enrollment is allowed in the course

-> Make student groups

-> Assign roles like: Administrator, Creator, Teacher (with and without editing permissions), students and guests.

It’s very sophisticated and allows you to add documents, forums, glossaries, surveys, a wiki, chat, assignments and more.

You can learn more about Moodle at Moodle.org. Also, if you’re a monthly Outsourcing Sweetie member, there is a training sheet that shows you the initial set up of a course in Moodle once you have it installed.

WP YouTube - A Handy & Fashionable Way to Show YouTube Videos

A while back, I tried to paste in YouTube code into my WordPress blog and discovered because I use the “Visual Editor”, it would mess up my whole template. I also discovered that when I moved from Blogger to WordPress all my carefully pasted videos, were gone or messed up.

To add the YouTube code, I had two choices. Use the text editor OR install a plug-in. Now, I’m proficient enough with a text editor, but I still like to be able to quickly preview the end result.

If you want to know how to switch to a text editor, there are full instructions on the FAQ.

Instead, I chose the WP YouTube plug-in. Not only can I paste in the YouTube videos easily, I can make my videos look pretty darned snazzy and match my purdy blog. You can set up multiple profiles that allow you to change the appearance of your videos through your control panel.

You can name the tag what you want, specify the size (IMPORTANT on this very narrow blog) and specify the colors. Then when you’re ready to post videos, all you need is the ID of the YouTube video (not the whole copy and paste code). For example the ID is shown in red below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjYT5OLoR8U

Then you simply take that ID and surround it with the label you set out in the profile.

Ex.

[your_tagname]YjYT5OLoR8U[/your_tagname]

The it turns out pretty nice like this below:

More information on this handy plug-in is here.

Freebie from Jimmy D. Brown: 30 Writing Tips for Ebook Authors

This was recently released by Jimmy D. Brown - to add to his amazing library of freebies. It’s a handy 29-page guide for ebook writers and sellers alike.

Download your copy of…

30 Writing Tips for Ebook Authors

Although the title states “for eBook Authors” the tips inside apply to anyone interested in writing.  This isn’t your normal run of the mill “anyone can write for their online business or create info products” ebook either.  The 30 tips inside are designed to make your writing BETTER!

It shows you how to overcome problems almost every writer experiences at some point in their career, such as:

* Writer’s Block
* Finding Motivation and Inspiration
* Getting & Staying Organized
* Providing Readers with Useful & Unique Information
* Finding Topics to Write About
…and more.

he tips inside will help you make the writing process easier, more enjoyable and profitable too, no matter what level of writer you are.

Free download is here (PDF)

Freebie: Stop Spam & Manage Your Email with Mailwasher

I actually shared this tool recently in my FAQ on How do you manage your email, but wanted to bring it back and give you more details on how Mailwasher is an incredible time and sanity saving tool .

From the Sweetie FAQ:

This great piece of desktop software helps you quickly sort your email with minimal fuss. It allows you to preview the email on your server, WITHOUT ever having to download unwanted messages to your computer. You can create blacklists, friends lists, etc…allowing you to sort your email in a flash.

I’ve been using the Pro version of Mailwasher for several years and wouldn’t have it any other way. I also always get my virtual assistants using it because I know it saves tons of time. Once they try it, they’re hooked and use it for all their clients.

You can download a free version and use it for as long as you want. The only catch is that it only works for one email address. If you want to use it for more than one email address, you’ve got to cough up a bit of cash, but it’s well worth it.”

I think words can’t do this tool justice and when I see people complain about spam, I can’t seem to express how it works and how much time it saves. So, I thought I’d give you a visual rundown of this handy software.

I open up the software and it checks all my emails. Hundreds of emails are previewed in the software within seconds and you can view the full text (no html for your protection) of any email in the preview pane at the bottom. Here’s an idea of what it looks like (I’ve removed the “from” field in the software for privacy reasons):

You’ll notice that some email senders are marked as “friend”, “blacklisted” and “origin blacklisted by spamcop”. The “friend” and “blacklisted” are set by me and that info is stored by Mailwasher. The “origin blacklisted by spamcop” is through the Spamcop database. Now, I don’t necessarily think Spamcop is the greatest thing, but I have to say these results prove to be quite accurate for my email.

Once email is loaded into the software (again it’s fast), you can easily sort by Date, Status, From…or whatever you want. In the example below, I’ve simply clicked the word “Sent” and it sorts by sent date. You can click any of the titles in the tabs at the top and sort according to that. Often, I sort by “Status” to put all the blacklisted senders to the bottom.

To update the status of any user, simply right click on the email in question. A pop-up will appear allowing you to add the specific email address to the blacklist or the whole domain to the blacklist. Or you put the specific address or the whole domain on your friends list.

To get your email ready for processing, you can go through each email and click the delete box to the far left (blacklisted emails are automatically set to delete) or if you have a lot of emails to delete, it might save more time to just choose the option of “Mark All Emails for Deletion” as shown below. I use this feature a lot, so I can just get rid of email that is FYI-type stuff and doesn’t require any action on my part. It keeps my Outlook inbox really (err…well pretty) clean:

Then, if you use that feature, you simply uncheck the emails you want to keep.

Once the you’ve marked all the emails that need to be deleted from your server (Remember - NOTHING has been downloaded to your computer, you’re just quickly previewing email off the server), you can process it. Just click “Process” and all the emails for deletion will be removed from your server.

Once the email has been deleted, you can open up your usual email program or have Mailwasher automatically open it for you and download the email you ACTUALLY want.

Voila!

There are other features you might want to explore, but that’s the basics. If looking at this process, it seems cumbersome to you - I promise it’s not. This process is quick and it’s a snap.

Again, you can download it free (for one email address) or pay the $39.95 for the Pro version (more than well worth it).

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