Anniversary Prize Giveaway Winners

The winners of the Anniversary Prize Giveaway have been announced today at David Airey’s blog. Congratulations to all of the winners and a happy anniversary to David Airey!

I am actually one of the winners. I’m surprised, because I have never won anything before. My prize is coming from Easton Ellsworth over at BusinessBlogWire. It’s for blog improvement or monetization advice. You know, I could probably use both. I would be very interested to hear what he has to say for my blog. I’m sure it could use a lot of improvements and I welcome suggestions and advice from anyone wanting to share.

Check out the other winners at David Airey’s blog.

Happy Birthday Google!

I wish Google a very happy 9th birthday and many more! If it wasn’t for Google, I probably wouldn’t receive the amount of traffic that I do. Google brings more visitors here than any other search engine. Yahoo is second. But, who cares about Yahoo, it’s not Yahoo’s birthday!

Google is growing larger and larger every year. Check out Google’s history on Wikipedia.

I wonder what new things Google will have in store for us in the next year.

Marketing Trend: Voice Messaging

A great way to market your product or service is through voice messaging, using Voice over IP technology. Vontoo voice messaging makes it easy to create, send and track voice messages. Vontoo is the first permission-based, on-demand voice messaging system. It’s not required to purchase software or hardware to use this technology.

There are benefits from using voice messaging instead of the traditional snail mail, which can become very costly and e-mail that just doesn’t quite get the message across with the expected results.

While email is useful for delivering information, its text and images simply cannot convey energy, emotion or enthusiasm. The human voice carries a more meaningful, compelling message.

Being permission-based allows people to hear messages they want to hear through an opt-in/opt-out registration. This opt-in/opt-out feature ensures full compliance with national and local Do-Not-Call regulations. The messages can be delivered in just minutes and tracked, allowing you to see how effective the messages are. Tracking is necessary, because knowing what works and what doesn’t is important when marketing your product or service. Vontoo allows you to find out how long a voice message was listened to and what calls have reached actual people.

People have had success through using Vontoo voice messaging, including the Boston Celtics. Their goal was to increase season ticket renewals. They sent messages featuring favorite players which resulted in more than $30,000 in sales. The use of voice messaging helped increase ticket sales. Adding players from the team to the messages also helped a lot with the sales, because it gave the message something more familiar to the recipients.

Based on reading the success stories, I think Vontoo works very well and the tracking system makes it very easy to learn how people react to the messages.

Sponsored by Vontoo

Financial Social Network

There’s a new social network in town. MyWallSt.net is for those of us who like to invest our money. This social network allows you to exchange ideas with other MyWallSt.net members, learn what you need to know regarding investing and also trade virtual money with real stock!

One feature I like that MyWallSt.net has is the watch list for watching stock. Not just that I can view my own watch list, but if I view someone’s profile, I can see what they are watching as well. Members can also see other profiles that are watching the same symbols, which can help you make friends with the same interests as yours.

I’ve used Sharebuilder to do some investing, but never really know which stock would be the best to invest in and how much I should invest. I end up doing a lot of research online and going with opinions from people I don’t even know who may have written the article weeks before I read it. This makes MyWallSt.net perfect. Let friends help you make those important financial decisions. It can be very hard to learn the best way of investing, what to invest in and how much. This can result in lots of money lost if you don’t know when to invest, too.

Check out MyWallSt.net and see how easy it is to create a profile for yourself and find friends to help you out with choosing the right stock. Also, join to play the Rookie Challenge for a chance to win money!

Besides getting help for yourself, you can also help out others if you have any tips to share with other people who are looking to invest!

Mouse With the Other Hand

I am right-handed, but with having had two kids and having to hold them all the time, I had to get used to using either hand to move the mouse or using the touch pad.

Although I’m ambidextrous anyway, I still wasn’t used to using my left hand to move the mouse, so I still had to learn. Surprisingly it wasn’t all that hard and it actually feels more comfortable than using my right hand. Obviously, this will not work very well if you have a mouse made to use with the right hand.

I just read about why you should mouse with the other hand over at LifeHacker. Check it out and maybe you’ll start using your left hand.