The first article is from Jeff Haden on 10 phrases or words to never include on your website. While these may not be anti-sales terms, they do not have any real positive affect on the site or your visitors.

Another by the same author is concerning writing a better about page.

Remembering that most articles on writing are written by copy writers, I would suggest a simple blueprint approach to developing web content.

1. Keep It Super Simple (the new K.I.S.S.!) – Use a sentence instead of a paragraph.  Use a paragraph instead of a full page.
2. Avoid industry terminology that may not connect with the customer.  Instead use words that you think the customer might use in a search engine to find you.  For web hosts, saying redundant power grids and cloud hosting might not be as effective as saying reliable web hosting and fast setup for example.
3. Be honest!  Too many websites just say what they think the customer wants to hear.  Long term customer relationships are based on upfront honesty.  How many websites say ‘we’ when they are a one person operation?  Using terms like industry leader, best products, or lying about the company size tend to push customers away.
4. Use imagery of your product or service in place of words when possible.

Staying simple and honest will help you build solid relationships from the start.

Image: nuttakit

Email spam has always been a problem for the productivity of businesses.  With new apps coming out daily, some have focused on this issue in creative ways.  When apps fail, then you have to rely on your own creativity using the tools you are already using.

Emailerr

Emailerr is a free tool to help protect your email address against spam bots that rip through websites collecting addresses to load into their spam sending software.  This is more common than you might think, and one of the most prevalent ways that spammers collect large masses of addresses.

Emailerr takes your email address and gives you 4 different solutions (different types of code and scripts) that you can drop into your website instead of typing out your email address.  This is great for your contact page, or any place in your website where you want your email address visible to the user but not to spammers.

TempAlias

You don’t always know the true intentions of website subscriptions, contact forms and website request forms.  It isn’t always easy to discern between legitimate enterprises and those that are there just to collect your data for marketing.

TempAlias gives you a free temporary email address that you can use to sign up for website services and trials.  You control the usage, based on how many days you want it active or how many emails you wish to receive before it shuts the email address down.  If you are signing up for a trial service, you may only set it to receive 10 messages or 10 days – whichever comes first.  That is more than enough emails from a site to find out if it is a good fit for you.

Find an app or service you love and wish to stay with it?  Simply change your address in your account settings with that specific app to your real email address when your ready to commit to the service.

Alternative Email Accounts

Gmail, Yahoo and MSN all offer free email accounts.  You can set up one of these free services (I prefer Gmail) to be a temporary email address to act as triage for incoming email.

If you use Gmail for your main email address, you can use its pop3 checking tools in the settings to even bring in email from your secondary account.  Use this with filters in your temporary account and you can protect yourself from inbox overload.

Gmail

Gmail has one of the best spam filtering systems of any email service.  I would say that you will rarely get an email that gets through their filtering system to your inbox.  You can use Google Apps to have the power of the Gmail system with your own business domain name, and its free for normal usage.  Larger storage requires a subscription.

Gmail also now has a priority inbox feature that helps identify high priority email and places them at the top of your email page.

Filters

Productivity in your inbox is not just about stopping spam.  Remember to filter your email if you use tools like Gmail so that mail that is not high priority gets marked as read and tagged/archived for later reading at your convenience.  Newsletters, site updates and product announcements can take up time during your premium hours.  Its also annoying having these types of emails pop up on your phone if you have a smart phone that is email capable.

Using some free apps, services and common sense goes a long way in helping to protect your inbox from spam and other productivity killers.

Image: renjith krishnan

Without notice or an email, I received a CR 48 Chrome OS laptop this week as part of the testing phase of the Chrome OS pilot program.  The Chrome OS has the opportunity to change the game for business (and personal use as well) by taking computing into the ‘cloud’ with full commitment.

Cloud computing is not a new concept, nor is it even original in nature.  Thin clients were prevalent in the 90s, with individual workstations being nothing more than input devices to a central server that housed software and data.  With laptops and the Internet taking more of a front seat in business, thin clients went away somewhat.  The cloud computing movement has taken us back to that idea, and the Chrome CR 48 laptop is the vehicle that best represents that shift back to centralized data and lean agile computing.

Fresh Out of the Box

The Hardware

My first impressions of the laptop are that it comes across very spartan in features.  The keyboard replaces function keys with a row of hot keys that control sound, brightness, window swapping etc.  The touch pad is just that… a pad with no buttons like Mac and PC users are used to.  This was built lean, and for a good reason – it only has to run one program, the Chrome OS.

Hardware wise, the touch pad is easy to use but a little frustrating at times.  Response time for a ‘right click menu’ for example can be just long enough for you to wonder if you clicked correctly.  Getting rid of the buttons, the Chrome OS laptop uses one finger clicks (left mouse button function), 2 finger clicks (right mouse button function) and 2 finger slide up and down (scroll function) to accomplish its goals.  I find drag/drop the most difficult and frustrating, but since this is a browser based OS, I am sure it is a rare occurrence that I will need it.

The keyboard is not for the feint at heart either.  Typing is slightly awkward due to the style of keys that the keyboard uses, with what almost seems like odd spacing between keys.  I find that there are times when I am typing and mis-spell more than normal, if that is possible, from mis-clicking keys.

Chrome OS

The operating system is simplicity at its peak.  The OS consists of a single program, the Chrome browser, with settings for the laptop built into its option menu.

Setup was so easy my 4 year old could have done it, simple click through steps from accessing your router to updating live in about 3-5 minutes tops.

Once installed, you use it just as you would a browser… which leads to the learning curve.  There are no installed programs, hard drive considerations or any of the sort.  You live your life online only with a Chrome OS laptop.  If you are already living online using Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and the like – you will feel right at home.  If you are like 99% of laptop users, you will find that there is always some program missing that is too hard to replace with an online application.  This may change, as new applications are surfacing everyday to take the place of old sluggish software.

Common business apps to replace your traditional software exists for mail, invoicing, document creation/sharing/management, website building and updating, hiring, lead management, customer relationship management and more.  Honestly, you could build a business model around apps just as you would have hard drive installed software.

The real beauty of the Chrome OS laptops are the low hardware requirements.  This should keep full sized laptops running Chrome OS minimal in cost, easily competing with netbook pricing (or less!).

Companies could outfit sales teams with these laptops and have them all on Salesforce, Zoho CRM or even custom web applications housed on their servers with low overhead and nearly a zero budget tech support department.

My observations of using the laptop for my day to day business apps found it working out well.  The only area that it suffers seems to be Adobe Flash sites.  Videos, advertisements and games (we all need a break now and again!) crashed occassionaly, usually when more than one Flash movie was on the same page.  For example, a Flash banner ad and a Flash driven movie on the same site caused one or the other to crash.  The laptop never freezes, just the Flash object on the page.

Instant on and off is correctly advertised with this laptop, but beware that you still have to wait a few seconds to obtain access to your router so there is a few second wait.  Even then, the laptop’s instant on is gratifying when your laptop probably takes double or triple the time to wake up from sleep/hibernation.

Battery life is incredible.  With no real power hogs such as high end video cards, you can expect more than 6-7 hours of usage before it goes dead.  Heavy video streaming might take more out of it.   Netflix is not available for Chrome OS yet.  When it does come available, you can be sure that I will test that part of it!

Conspiracy Theory

Just as the Android OS does, cloud computing using the Chrome OS scares the living daylights out of users when it comes to privacy.  Normal people become paranoid easily when they learn that no real data is stored on their computer.  The whole idea behind cloud computing is that your data, whether it is documents or photos, are sitting on someone’s servers out in the great open space of the Internet.

The best action you can take to protect yourself is to use common sense when using online applications, and practice due diligence when choosing apps that will house personal or business data.

I have been using Gmail and the web mail interface for over 3 years, and have moved almost all my business applications to be replaced with online apps since then.  I find it very liberating to be able to work from anywhere there is an Internet connection without worrying that I left that one file on my computer back home or at the office.

Final Thoughts

The laptop has potential and is probably one of the strongest entry level pushes into an unknown market I have seen.  Even with the shortcomings of the hardware, I have no doubt this can be tweaked into a low maintenance and low cost replacement for most laptop users that primarily live and work online.

UPDATE:

I activated the 3g Verizon package that Google has generously included in the pilot program.  It is a basic package of 100mb per month at no cost to the user.  The activation seems simple enough, 1 or 2 pages to fill out but after it was activated it just kept going back to the same screen asking me for my credit card and address.  I even received an email from Verizon saying I was activated but it still has me in a loop on the web page when I try to activate 3g.  I am sure with a little tweaking I will get it to work out, if not I will rely on Verizon’s support staff to bail me out.

As leaders in our businesses and communities, it is easy to overburden ourselves to a point of burnout. Many rely on vacations to provide a refresh of the mind, body and soul. It is advantageous to do so, however there are still low valleys of productivity before and after a vacation that can last weeks.

We require small refreshments weekly or daily, which can provide us with short term effects such as increased focus, motivation and productivity. Try one of these simple steps whenever you need to change your batteries.

• Mini-Meditation Period – Find a quiet place, away from any distractions, electronics, people or sounds outside of natural sounds.  Take long 5 second breaths in, then 5 second breaths out.  If you are unable to do 5 seconds due to health etc, do them as long as you can without discomfort.  If you have health issues that might be affected by this exercise, consult a doctor beforehand.   Do 20 of these breaths in an out concentrating only on the breathing.  This takes forces your conscience mind to take over the function of the sub-conscience and forces your focus to the breathing rather than on stresses and business.
• Write a letter (not an email!) to a friend.  Not a business letter to a client, but someone you enjoy doing non-business related activities with.  After five or ten minutes of righting, your mind will have allowed your conscience and sub-conscience mind to remember fun activities you had with the individual.  These memories are like a mini-vacation for your mind!  Don’t forget to send the letter.  A response back will provide another break from the hustle of business and leadership.
• Do something charitable.  Do not just give money, but donate time to help someone in need.  A friend move, have dinner with an elderly person that lives alone, mentor a child or just serve dinner at the local soup kitchen.  When we help others, our mind rewards us with an emotional boost that can increase our feelings of self value and confidence.
• Do something artistic.  Most of us have the instinct to create.  Paint, draw, write or sculpt – it all will help release a creative side of our minds that can be rewarding in future focus and motivation.  If you are not creative in the artistic sense, try thinking of a subject you know a lot about, and write the first two pages of a book on the subject.  This may even help you get into a writing rhythm which could lead you to write an entire book!

Remember, vacations have large impacts on your focus and productivity, however small boosts are required to keep us at peak proficiency year round.

Image: federico stevanin

Business owners are rarely left standing still, yet the rut we create while moving in the same direction over and over creates a stagnancy in our routine that can cause a business to back peddle.  Business owners are constantly fighting to stay ahead competitively but rarely look at the big picture of their overall ‘business health.’

Just as we as humans can fall into depression with little to no change in our lives, businesses can suffer the same type of demise.  The 3 simple rules to fighting stagnancy can be put in place quickly with fast results.

1. Accept change.  It is useful to set goals because our minds generally require boundaries and the proverbial ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ Staying rigid in our path not only starts that dangerous rut, but also stops us from spotting opportunities as they present themselves just outside those boundaries.

2. Embrace change.  Accepting that change is inevitable and is happening all around us is not enough.  We have to want to enjoy change as it happens and we will find not just a few opportunities but rather hundreds.  We have to revel in the fact that powers outside our own cause interactions with ourselves and our businesses constantly and allow ourselves to enjoy it.

3. Stay flexible.  Changing goals is not evil, nor will we not succeed if we do so!  We are not failing because we change our goals, we are shifting our business to capture opportunities based on our environment.

Consider embracing change in your personal life as well.  Here are some things in your routine that might create opportunistic change in your life and that of your business:

• Have lunch or breakfast once a week with someone new, a client or a vendor or a friend.  Change it up weekly and remember to keep your lunch partners rotating so that you constantly are getting fresh conversation and ideas flowing.
• Have a board meeting with your family.  Get their input on how the business is affecting their lives and bounce ideas off of them.  The simplistic logic of a 4 year old can sometimes move mountains!
• Take a day away from work every week.  Two if you can afford it.  No emails, no phone and no working at home.  Visit the zoo with the family, visit a friend for a weekend getaway or simply read a book and enjoy a movie.  Refreshen yourself and you will be amazed at how easy it is to accept and embrace change when it comes along.
• Send out a letter (not email) to your clients asking them for one thing that they would think might change your company for the better.  Be ready to accept criticism, but seek for insight into how your business might adjust its path for the better.

Image: federico stevanin