That can get a bit frustrating and expensive.

So a lot of small business owners and solopros will spring for Adobe Photoshop (ouch! over $600), or use Gimp, the free alternative (huge learning curve).

But no more. Now there’s a better, easy solution.

A friend of mine told me about Box Shot King, a new online graphic creation software. I went nosing around to find out about it and ended up watching an hour long video (which I NEVER do — until now!). I was so thrilled when I saw this software for the first time. I could not believe it was as simple as the video demonstrated.

But it really is.

You can literally create a cool looking graphic in less than five minutes — and there is no learning curve. Here’s one I created less than 10 minutes after I signed up. Yep. That’s my front page on an iPad.

Here’s a video that shows you just how simple it is. (And it’s only five minutes long!)

If you cant see the video, click here.

Pretty cool, huh? Here’s another thing I really like about this. It’s in the cloud. That means nothing to download. Plus you can use it on any computer — doesn’t matter whether you use a PC or Mac.

And it’s not expensive. It’s priced at $99 a year (more on that later), and I have a coupon you can use to get $30 off. So it will cost you $69 for twelve months. (You might be able to get one graphic for that amount normally!)

Just follow this link to go to the site and enter my coupon oberry when you get there. It will be applied and when you click Buy Now, you’ll only be charged $69.

So you might be wondering what’s so great about software you have to pay for every 12 months? Well, what I think is cool about that is since it’s a membership site, the owner (who is a really nice guy — Jack Born) can add new stuff for you to use. I’m good with that. I hope you are too. But you have nothing to lose. With your payment comes a 60 day money back guarantee, so if you decide you don’t like it you can get a refund (but I know you will love it!)

I’ve been playing around with it a bit and wanted to show you how simple it is to make a graphic from scratch. So I made a new eCover and recorded it in the video below. This took less than five minutes. Give it a watch.

If you can’t see the video, you can click here.

If you’re just dying to get in and play with the software, you can click this link (and don’t forget to use my coupon oberry to get $30 off). Or you can watch another quick video below where I take the eCover I just made and modify it. Less than five minutes again — so cool and easy!

If you can’t see the video, click here.

Can you see why I love this software so much? I know it can do some amazing stuff and I haven’t even scratched the surface. There are all sorts of options for manipulating the graphics. You’ll see that once you get on the inside.

I do want to tell you about one other thing. Support. Often these type of sites are really lacking in that area, but not this one. Remember when I told you above how nice Jack Born (the owner) was? Well, when I first logged in to my account after my purchase and went to create my first graphic, I got an error. That pesky apostrophe in my name causes so much trouble online. So I entered a support request and within 20 minutes had a response and a fix. (I made my purchase at 8:23pm, logged in, had a problem, sent a support ticket and got a response via email at 8:44pm.) Amazing!

Obviously I don’t have anything but praise to say about this new graphics software. If you have the need to create just one graphic (and I know you won’t stop there), you should get a membership.

You can click here to get your membership and don’t forget to use my coupon to save $30 — oberry

That’s where you come in.

Chances are, you’ve bought an information product or two (I don’t even want to tell you how many I’ve bought in the last 10 years!) and if you think about it, you’ll find that the people selling you those products all have one thing in common…

They have what’s called an information product pipeline. In other words, they have a lot of products they sell. Things like:

• Small reports
• Webinars
• Coaching classes
• Physical products
• Membership sites

Most of which are at different price points — anywhere from $17 into the thousands. And when they spend time and effort to find a new customer, they get order after order because of their “pipeline” of products!

Here’s what typically happens.

A customer buys an inexpensive $17 product and they really like it. They got value from the product and built some trust in the person they bought it from. So when that person offers them a medium priced product in the $47-$97 range, they buy it.  And they end up liking that too. So then they join a monthly membership site and may purchase a high ticket coaching program from the very same person.

Soon, they’ve bought almost everything offered by the marketer.  They anxiously await new products.  And they buy them — often without even reading the sales letter. (Yep, I’ve done this too.)

So the question is…

Are you the customer or the marketer in that above scenario?

There’s no reason why you can’t be the person with the entire empire of products that others buy from you. Especially with help from my colleague Jimmy D. Brown. Jimmy is a master at this stuff. I’ve taken two of his year long courses (Affiliatenaire and Membernaire — which are no longer available) and I can tell you that each weekly lesson is packed with action steps you can take to move your business forward. That’s what I’ve done over the years and I have been very successful.

Thankfully, Jimmy has developed a new program to help you meet your customers’ needs. So now you can learn from Jimmy too. Click here for more information about his new program.

If you want to create a “pipeline” of your own products that you sell for $17, $47, $97, $1,497 (and more!) then Jimmy D. Brown can help you. He’s created hundreds of products since he became a full-time internet marketer way back in August 2000.  He knows how to find out what people want, how to create those products quickly and how to convince people to buy over and over again.

He can show you how to do the same thing. As he has shown me.

His new program is called Info Product Pipeline. In it, you’ll learn how to create it all:  Kindle ebooks, membership sites, small reports, webinars, physical products, coaching programs, eclasses and you’ll be tapping into Jimmy’s wisdom and lessons learned. I have no doubt this program will produce results for you as long as you take action.

It’s really inexpensive too. No real barrier to the pocketbook here. Take a look and see if it will work for you. Jimmy is the real deal and I trust him 100%.

Get all the details by clicking here now.

Until now.

I recently heard about a fairly new (in the cloud) social media management tool called Postling. Built specifically with small business owners in mind, it aims to make your life simpler by allowing you to manage all your accounts (blog posts, comments, facebook posts, tweets, retweets, replies, and more!) all from a single dashboard.

How do you spell relief?

Well, for many small business owners that would be spelled P-O-S-T-L-I-N-G. Seriously though, I took it for a good test drive last week to see if it really would help small business owners simplify their social media management and my conclusion is a resounding — YES!

And what’s really cool is that it’s free. Yep, won’t cost you a dime to manage your social media properties for your business. There are way too many cool things on the inside to write a post about (it would be a book!), so I recorded a video tour for you. Take a few minutes to watch it, and then head over to Postling and get your own account.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

If you liked what you saw in the video, you’ll love the real thing. I am very excited about this tool and think it’s going to be a real time saver for small business owners who already have too much to do.

P.S. I found out today that they just got another injection of money from investors to make additional improvements to the service. Head on over there now and get your account set up.

Have you tried Postling? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Update: I knew this little startup was going to be a key player. They have just added two new features that make this an even better service. Now you can:

• Reply-By-Email for “Instant Alerts” — You will receive instant email alerts and can reply to the email, by typing your message, and hitting send. This is all within your inbox. What you replied with posts directly to the right social networks.

• Link Previews for FB updates — When you update your FB status, now you can insert a thumbnail image. Just type the message, include the URL and Postling gives thumbnail options.

I truly don’t understand why someone would do that when they could use software like QuickBooks to make their life easier and save them time to do important things like marketing their business.

I love QuickBooks and have used it for ten years. I was thrilled when the folks at Intuit contacted me and asked if I’d like a briefing on the new Quickbooks 2011.

I’ve been working in the 2008 version so it was a real treat to see what had been added and changed. In addition to the briefing, they sent me the software so I could take a real test drive. Dealing with financials in your business isn’t a real sexy activity like marketing, but it’s an absolute must for your business.

Intuit Is Focused on Making It Easier For You

One of the things that’s important for you to know is that the people at Intuit have an objective for this product. They want to you be able to get in, do what you need to do, and then get out so you can focus on the important “front office” tasks in your business. That’s smart. They know your financial information is critical to your business, but they also know you have plenty of important things to do. I like that. Being in tune to customers is critical.

If you aren’t yet using software to manage the financials in your business, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You can give it a test run for free by signing up for Quickbooks Simple Start online.

So let’s get on with some of the cool new things this version will help you do. From what I understand Company Snapshot, with a dashboard of information about your business, was introduced in QuickBooks 2009 and updated in 2010. In QuickBooks Pro 2011, they’ve added a Customer Snapshot that will be so useful for your business. You can see in the screen shot below that the customer information screen contains pretty much everything you would want to know about your customer. It has five widget areas that will show you:

• Customer Overview
• Recent Invoices
• Recent Payments
• Sales History
• Best Selling Items

Having this information at your fingertips will help you know what action to take when with any customer. Very cool, huh?

But wait. There’s more.

Batch Invoicing has been added to this version making it quick and easy for you to get those invoices out the door so you can get the cash into your bank account.

If you provide a service that uses monthly recurring billing, you will particularly like this option. You can create billing groups for specific classes of customers and then invoice every single one of them with a few clicks of the mouse. And once the invoices are created, you have the options to either print or send off via email. This will be a huge time saver. You can see a screen shot below of the beginning of the Batch Invoicing process.

If you’ve been following me for very long, you know how I feel about making sure you collect all the money you are due. To help you with this, QuickBooks Pro 2011 includes a new option called the Collections Center. You can use this to see the status of your outstanding invoices so you can take the appropriate action.

And they have refined the search function in this version too. It’s a pretty powerful tool.

And last but not least.

If you have an iPhone, there is a QuickBooks app that allows you to do many of the same things you can do in the software. For you android lovers, nothing on the drawing board yet but I made the suggestion.

Although Quickbooks 2011 is an awesome tool for small business owners, I think it is still missing one thing — a cash flow budget forecast. If Intuit can get that feature in a future upgrade, it would be perfect. But in the meantime, you can get your very own cash flow budget worksheet here.

So you already know I use and love this product. Shouldn’t you give it a try too? Take a look at what option will work for you. And remember you can get started for free.

Do you have the new version? Let’s talk about it. Or just tell me about your experience with (or without) QuickBooks by leaving a comment.

Note: I am an authorized affiliate of QuickBooks. If you follow the links in this post and purchase, I will make a small commission.

I don’t know about you, but I like easy, reliable and affordable services for my business. And when I can save a few bucks, that means more gets added to my bottom line. That’s one of the reasons I use Skype as my business phone service.

A lot of people think Skype is just this free service that anyone can use to connect via voice or video over the internet. It definitely is that, but it’s also much more. Skype is a full fledged VOIP phone service. You can actually get a phone number that people can call you on through your Skype service. I’ve been using the service as my main business phone since January, and other than one small blip, it’s been excellent.

So if you’re thinking about making a change, now might be a good time. I just got word from them that they are offering 20% off all 12 month subscription packages until Wednesday, September 15th. That is a heckuva deal. I am saving about $900 a year with my Skype phone service. Maybe you could save a pile of dough for your business too.

Take a look at their subscription options and see if now might be the right time to make the move.

Let me first say I absolutely believe it is safe to buy online. I actually think it’s more of a danger to hand over your credit card to a server who walks away with your card to some dark corner of a restaurant, than it is to use a credit card online. Which, by the way, is how credit card fraud happened to me a few years ago — but that’s a story for another day.

So, let’s talk about what happened last week. My email notifier popped up on my phone and when I went to check it, I had seven order receipts from my PayPal account.

No one but me uses that account so I knew there was something wrong. When I opened the emails, I nearly got sick to my stomach. The receipts were for purchases at the iTunes store and all told amounted to just shy of $300. The really bad part of this is that I keep a minimum amount of funds in my PayPal account — typically less than $200 — so the orders had begun to draw from my bank account (the back up funding source to my PayPal account). It would have been easy to panic.

But I didn’t.

The first thing I did was to log in to my iTunes account, change my password, and cancel my iTunes billing agreement (more on this in a minute). Then I did the same thing with my PayPal account. That stopped the flow. It’s amazing what a few tiny characters can do.

Then I had to worry about cleaning up the mess.

I started with iTunes. I couldn’t find an iTunes support phone number so I called the Apple support number. And here’s an irritating practice. Apple doesn’t have a support phone number for iTunes. The only option you have is to enter a support ticket via their online form and they promise a response within 48 hours. Ugh! So I entered the details of my issue in the online form and sent it on it’s way.

In the meantime, I contacted PayPal phone support. Yes, you can talk to a real live human. Hurray! I was a bit concerned about getting a refund on the fraudulent purchases from iTunes and wasn’t sure if I should initiate an action from my PayPal account or not. The rep (Thanks Amber!) assured me that I surely could do that, either right away or wait until the 48 hours had passed. I decided to wait.

And I waited. And waited. And waited for what seemed like forever. Forty eight hours passed with no response from iTunes. So I decided to give them one more day.

That did the trick. On the third day of waiting — I got the refund emails from PayPal, that iTunes initiated, a short time before I received their email telling me they were refunding. They were very apologetic about the delay and advised me of steps to take to mitigate fraud issues in the future. (I had already done these — first — see above.)

So all is well and my money was completely refunded. I’m relieved. But there’s a lesson in this story and that’s why I’m telling it to you.

1. Your first line of defense for any of your online accounts is your password. It’s a really bad idea to use a “standard” password on many online accounts. I know this and so do you. But do we practice it? Most of us don’t. I’ve gotten in the habit of using my “standard” password when I first set up an online account, then coming back after it’s established and changing it to a more secure password. That is a bad practice. My iTunes account was three years old and I had never changed it to a secure password. There’s no excuse not to change it except pure laziness (or busyness) since I use a really awesome password manager called RoboForm to help me randomly create secure passwords and keep track of them.

2. Don’t set up one click billing agreements. Technology has made it very easy for all of us to do so much in a single click, we’ve gotten lazy. And that can put your finances in jeopardy, just like it did mine. When I think about the possibilities that didn’t happen — what if the purchases had occurred in the middle of the night and subsequently cleaned out my bank account along with triggering all sorts of other charges? The damage could have been several thousand dollars, not a few hundred. It just makes me cringe. I was really lucky. So even though you can set up one click ordering on web sites like iTunes, it doesn’t mean you should. Forward think the possibilities of what could happen if your account is compromised. Then decide what to do. If the possibilities aren’t pretty, then don’t do it. I know I won’t.

3. Change your critical passwords on a regular basis. I’m planning on changing my passwords every time the time changes just like I do my smoke alarm batteries. More frequent would even be better, but at least it’s a start.

There you go. That’s my story about online credit card fraud. You can control what happens to you with a few simple keys by making sure you have a secure password. I’ll certainly be more diligent about it now and leverage the excellent password manager I have at my fingertips. What about you?

Originally built for those wonderful tech geeks and developers among us who create very cool programs and applications to make our life simpler, Amazon S3 is not just for geeks anymore.

It’s an excellent solution to storage issues — things like pictures, videos, audios — all the stuff that’s going to become run of the mill as the interwebs move forward and grow. And it’s dirt cheap. I’ve had several files stored on my account since I set it up last year and my charges have been a whopping $ .05 a month. Yep, you read that right. A whole five cents a month!

It’s not yet super easy to use for non-techies like you and me. But the good news is that tons of “make it easy” tools have been built and it’s getting simpler.

I was lucky. When I decided to get started, one of my mastermind group members, Mark Mason of MasonWorld, walked me through the process. (That’s one of the huge benefits of a mastermind group.)

I found a really good tutorial for you to get started. You will find it here – A Beginner’s Guide to Amazon S3.

And once you get it going, you’re going to want the S3 Fox Addon for Firefox, S3 Browser, and the S3 WordPress Plugin. All of them are free.

There are a ton of uses for Amazon S3. If you haven’t looked at them as a possible benefit to your business, now would be a good time.

Let’s talk about it. I’d love to hear how you are using Amazon S3 and what tools you use to make the experience easier.

I’ve had getting a new computer headset on my “I want it” list for a while and am just not really good at shopping around. I’m not big on “in person” shopping at all and often there are so many choices online, it’s tough to make a decision. Plus I like to hear about other people’s experience with techno-gadgets before I leap.

So when my colleague Lynn Terry talked about her wireless computer headset recently, I sat up and paid attention. The wireless option sounded really super to me — to not be tethered to my computer would be a really cool thing!

Well, it arrived on Friday and I put it to work right away. This headset is awesome! The sound quality — both from a listening and speaking perspective is excellent.

Heck, I even activated my Skype for Business account and am looking forward to using my new VOIP phone service (more on that in another post).

Here’s what I really like about this computer headset in addition to it being wireless.

>> It has a 40 foot range.

While I was catching up on my long list of audio recordings last night, I walked all over my house (even outside!) and never lost the signal. My house isn’t huge (about 2300 sq), but my office is at one end while everything else is at the other. The headset never missed a beat.

>> Up to eight hours of usage.

Eight hours is a pretty long time to wear a headset (unless you’re a gamer — I’m not). This amount of time will be plenty for me on a daily basis, even when I spend an entire day on conference calls.

>> Super comfortable.

The ear covers and top of the headset are covered with comfy, cushy padding. Even after a few hours it was easy to forget I was wearing this headset.

>> Controls on the headset.

The left ear cover has volume and fast forward controls which is really convenient. And all you have to do is lift the mouthpiece to mute your sound.

The only thing that might be a drawback for some people is that you can’t use it while it’s charging. I don’t see that as a problem for me as I plan to charge it at night while I sleep.

I am so looking forward to using this headset over the long term. If you are searching for a comfortable, high quality wireless computer headset at a modest price, you owe it to yourself to give the Plantronics Audio 995 Wireless Computer Headset a try.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this headset or another that you’ve used. Please take a moment and leave me a comment.

P.S. I love this headset so much I bought two! That way I always have a fresh, fully charged headset for my listening (and talking!) needs.

I’ve used an online fax service since 2007 and have been totally happy with it. If you’re looking to ditch your fax machine and “go green” with faxes, it  might be worthwhile to take a look at my online fax review.

Recently Nextiva contacted me and asked if I’d take a look at their service. I’m always open to looking at new (to me!) providers on the market so they set me up with a temporary free account that would give me a chance to take their online fax service for a test drive and tell you about it. (Note: You can take a 30 day free trial here.)

I was impressed. Their online dashboard is simple to navigate and easy to understand. I was sending and receiving faxes in minutes. The service is very quick so faxes show up right away.

Nextive fax service allows you to send and receive by email, from the web, or via your cell phone (if you have email access on your phone), and you can fax from any Microsoft application too.

I didn’t have an opportunity to use their support system, but based on the research I did on Nextiva it appears their customer support is top notch, which can be a huge differentiator for an online service provider.

Based on my test drive and what I’ve been able to ferret out, I’d say Nextiva is a top notch choice if you’re moving to an online fax service. And you can’t beat the price. Right now you can get service as low as $6.95 a month if you choose to pay annually. With that option, you’re allowed 500 pages a month (a lot!).

So if you want to be “more green” to help the environment, save time and money in your business, you owe it to yourself to give Nextiva online fax service a try.

Have you used Nextiva online fax? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Note: I liked the service so much I became an affiliate. That means if you choose to sign up with them, I’ll get a commission. That’s how I provide the free resources on this website for you.

I did my due diligence and decided to join the site, then proceeded to invite some of my contacts who I thought would find it useful. And much to my surprise, people have been getting these invites right and left. So I guess I’ve either ignored the previous invites or have been living in a cave lately.

I do like the site concept as it is applicable to consultants and contract workers. That might even be you.

What I don’t like about it is that you can’t check and see who is already registered so you don’t invite them again and the invite message (although there are a few different formats) can’t be modified. I’d much rather be able to type my own personal message to invite someone than use a “canned” one.

Will let you know what turns up from this site. Stay tuned.

Update: Can’t vouch for the current version of the site. Buyer beware.

Do you have experience with Blue Chip Experts? Please leave me a comment.