Image by laurenmarek via Flickr

If you’re promoting anything online it can help your sales massively to localize your offer or the data on the page to the visitor.

An example of this might be some copy on the page dynamically generated for the visitor’s area – “Expert house painting in Seattle, WA. Click here for an instant quote.”

The easiest way to do this is if you have the searcher’s location already. For example: If you have a geolocated search campaign where the advertising network is providing you with zip and/or city data you can pass it through as a URL variable like yourpage.php?city=Seattle&state=WA

But there’s a sure fire way to make sure you’re localizing your content and offer to your visitors area; you can run a GeoTargeting PHP script in conjunction with a free zip code database.

I do this for certain things I promote on the internet such as auto insurance offers and other services that aren’t location specific but where I want the visitor to feel like they’re getting a localized result. It’s always resulted in a higher conversion rate when I’ve done that.

Instead of rewriting tutorials that already exist I thought I’d point you to a couple of resources that I’ve used.

Eric Nagel’s Geo-Targeted PHP script

Free Zip Code Database from the Zip Code Guy

Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

I have a few Google Voice invites to give away to anyone who’d like them. I really dig Google Voice for a few different reasons. First and foremost is the ability to hand out a number that’s neither my cell phone or my business 800 number. This is convenient when you have a contact who doesn’t quite fit into a prescribed and trusted relationship. Maybe it’s a temporary vendor or someone you met at a networking function that you want to keeps at arms length, so to speak. If they become a nuisance or someone that you’d rather not deal with in the future you can “redirect” their call when it comes in.

You can also work the system a bit. For example, I was able to drastically lower my cell bill by downgrading the minutes on my cell plan by making my Google Voice number one of my free numbers on my account. Most carriers have some version of this. For AT&T it’s called the “A-List”. When someone calls my GV number it automatically connects to my cell phone but caller id comes in as my GV number. Therefore I’m not charged against my minutes for that call. Yes, I know that I give up the ability to know who’s calling me but it’s not worth the $700 a year I save to go back. There’s even a GV app for some phones on some carriers. I believe you can get it for Android and Blackberries on T-Mobile and Verizon.

Here’s a more complete review from Lifehacker.com

So if you want one of my invites just be one of the first to comment. I’ll send an invite to the email address you use when you comment until I’m out.

I’m not exactly sure when GoToMeeting web conferencing started to work with Macs. All I know is that it has been amazingly useful for my mobile lifestyle.
I’ve been traveling for the last month and I have another couple weeks to go. In the time I’ve been away from my desk I’ve launch two websites and performed training for the customer using GoToMeeting. I also held a performance review for one of my internet marketing clients where I was able to log into her advertising accounts and go over the numbers.

Here’s what I like about using software of this type. Especially GoToMeeting:

1. It’s actually a better experience for demonstrating software and online work than being face to face. I know this may seem counter intuitive. It works though. Rather than crowding around a screen each participant can sit in front of their own computer comfortably and fully participate.

2. You can have multiple presenters and the hand off is super simple. With one of our meetings I had three presenters going over the areas that they were responsible for. To switch to their screens and give them total control all I had to do was choose their name from a simple drop down and instruct GoToMeeting to make them the presenter. You also can opt just to give them control of the keyboard and mouse while staying as the presenter.

3. It makes your clients feel good. Yes, it gives them the “warm fuzzies”. Or, at least, I’m assuming it does. A lot of your clients/customers/partners may have not had a web conferencing or webinar experience before. It’s a high-tech communication experience for them that gets the job done.

4. You can provide support easily. If a client needs help setting up a piece of software, needs training on a web tool, or needs you to look at something on their computer, it’s super simple to switch the present and have control of their mouse and keyboard. This has been very useful to me more times than I can count.

Check it out. They have a free trial period that includes all the features and functionality. Let me know how you like it (or don’t) in your comments below.

GoToMeeting: Free Trial + $10 Off.

I made a post some time ago offering an beta invitation to any reader who would provide a review of the GrandCentral.com service. I ended up giving the invite to someone who had already wrangled an invite for themself and was already using the service. However she graciously agreed to write a review anyway. What a swell person! Here it is:

Hi! Actually someone already sent me an invite (I’ve been trying for two months to get one!), but thank you! I can tell you about my experience though. My boyfriend and I both got accounts about a week ago, and it is pretty cool.

You do get to pick your own phone number, but it’s out of a list, and I settled on one after I couldn’t find anything with the last four digits spelling something I liked. Since I can’t figure out how to clear off my cell phone’s voicemail after spending hours on it, I loved their voicemail system. You can listen in while someone is leaving a message and decide whether to pick up or not. And my mom really liked my custom message for her.

One thing I definitely didn’t like was that my boyfriend and I both use the same home phone, but only one of us can put it on our account. I asked GrandCentral about it via email and they got back to me extremely quickly, saying they would be offering it in the future, but not in the Beta stage. Since Google tends to keep there programs in Beta for years, this kind of bummed me out. I also didn’t like the lack of options for the ringback tones. They were pretty abysmal, including one extremely annoying male voice saying he was from Las Vegas.

Another cool thing is that you can record calls just by pressing 4 on your phone at any time. This actually came in really handy when a computer parts order didn’t go through right. You can also mark callers as “spam,” letting you completely ignore those pesky telemarketers. So far these have been the features I’ve used the most of; I’ll keep you updated on anything new I find out about it. –Caroline

Thanks Caroline!

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[UPDATE: I'M PLUM OUT OF INVITES. SORRY. BUT, BY ALL MEANS, READ THE ARTICLE!]

I have one GrandCentral.com invitation I’m willing to give up for the first reader who asks for it via a comment below and will complete a simple assignment. That assignment being that they need to write a comment (or an email perhaps) in return after they’ve used it for a while to let us know how it’s working for them. I may use their comments in an upcoming post about using these kinds of tools to manage the mobile worker lifestyle.

I’ve been using GrandCentral for a week or two now and I personally find it very useful. Very handy. Yes, indeed.

I was ruminating the other day over the fact that the last thing that keeps me from being able to be truly mobile was my paper mail. I arrived home from a trip to find that a bunch of critical mail had backed up and needed my immediate attention. I remembered seeing some sort of mail handling service online that receives your mail for you, scans it in a secure building by veterans with security clearance, allows you to view it online and decide if you want to shred it, download a pdf copy, or forward it. (You can also have it thrown away but I wonder why one would choose that over shredding?) You can continue to receive your magazines and personal correspondence at home. It’s called Earth Class Mail and I love it!

Here’s a quote from their website:

Just like email and voice mail, your postal mail can now be instantly available to you, online, no matter where you are. Use your downtime to save yourself the later headache of Mail Pile-up Syndrome.

Postal mail got you down? We can guess: you’re hyper-connected with a wireless laptop and a PDA that gets email, but you check your postal mail — at home and at the office — only after an exhausting business trip. That is, you manage postal mail the same way Ben Franklin did. But you know the benefits of being totally connected to email and voice mail no matter where you are.

If you use cell phones instead of phone booths, voice mail instead of a secretary or friend (when was the last time someone took a message for you?), if you use email or faxes in place of much postal mail, then you already know what 21st-century technology can do for mail. And no one in the world but us is doing it.

In my case this is an awesome service. I have business and personal mail and want access to it while I travel. As soon as a piece of mail comes in I get an email and I can view the envelope in their virtual mailbox center to see what I want to do with it. If it looks like I need to see what’s inside I have them scan it and it’s available the next day for viewing. The assumption is – and I think this will prove to be true for almost everyone – that you really don’t need almost any paper copies of mail anymore except in rare cases. Even billers will accept e-checks from banks without the invoice stub attached. For that really important stuff they will forward it at a really reasonable cost but I don’t think I’m going to need hardly anything sent to my physical location.

I was going to have my business mail forwarded from my USPS post office box to my home address or wherever I happened to be but their premium mail forwarding service costs at least $40 per month. Ouch! Here’s the pricing for the Earth Class Mail service. I went for the Silver Plan and paid for the year.

It looks like they will soon offer check processing via ACH. Considering the cost to process your own checks (time, energy, and gas $), this is an awesome feature.

Just in case I’ve butchered the description of what this is here’s another blurb from their website:

Here’s how it works. First, you pick a “DCI Remote Address” at one of our locations, and have selected time-sensitive mail sent to us (you can keep sending packages, magazines and anything else you wish to your current address, if you like). As a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency, we are then able to pick up your mail from the Post Office every day, instantly scan in all the envelope images, and then, voila!, electronically deliver each envelope image to you online. You decide what happens next . . .

There is one other service out there PaperlessMail.com that does a very similar thing but I just don’t trust them for some reason. It doesn’t look legit enough and I don’t want important mail going to someone I don’t trust. Plus they only have one location, so they can’t be very big. I like the security that Earth Class Mail is providing.

If you are a user of this service or end up becoming a user, come back and tell me what you think. I’m still a pretty new user myself but so far think it’s great.

Get Your Postal Mail Online