Matt Townley
Forum Replies Created
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Unless these have been DRASTIC changes made in the last year, YES, the mac version IS VERY different than the Windows counterparts. Last time I looked, they might as well not be sold under the same name.
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I used to have a similar workflow, but a few years ago I switched completely to Quickbooks. I use the Print to PDF function to emails invoices and since our credit card processing is all done through Intuit, I have it set to include a link in the invoice to pay online using a credit card. They click on it, and it forwards them to a little site with out company logo on Intuit’s server and they pay securely. As soon as they pay, I get an email and then I can go into Quickbooks and sync the payment that posts to their account. Works wonderfully.
I like you idea of having it sync with mobileMe to be accessible on your iphones. Intuit, I think it’s time for an iPhone App that syncs with my Quickbooks file…..
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It sounds like you have a means to rip the content and re-author a new PAL DVD, but you still need to transcode the NTSC video file into PAL. Is it safe to assume you have Compressor?
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
I have to second what Tim said. I run have been running Quickbooks Pro in Parallels (on my Mac) for a number of years and can’t imagine trying to run my business without Quickbooks. My primary business is duplication and replication, so the majority of what I sell is taxable. Quickbooks makes easy work out of managing sales tax. I think you can get a free demo of Quickbooks, but you would have to have a host OS to run it, and I don’t think you would be able to demo the virtual OS part of the equation.
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Using Facebook (and twitter, for that matter) opens the door for all of your clients and the rest of the world to know who each other are. I have been hesitant to use social networking for business for just this reason. I work primarily with corporate and commercial clients, and many of their companies restrict access to social networking sites anyways.
If your customers are mainly consumer, this may be a good way to go, but for b2b, I would stick with traditional email.
Just my 2c.
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
Hm, I was hoping you were going to say MacOS. My idea was going to be to play with an AppleScript to catch the outgoing emails between your CRM and the outgoing smtp port. If you trapped them there, you could write something to only let 999 hit the smtp server per hour until they were all sent. Not sure if this would work in practice or not…..would take some playing. Not to mention I am not sure how to approach it in Windows.
That being said, I am curious what aspect of your ISP is preventing you for sending more than 999 emails per hour. What about routing things through a proxy server?
From a more conceptual POV, I agree that it is somewhat of a hassle to keep your data up-to-date between your CRM and Constant Contact. I use Quickbooks and have about 1,000 clients in it and another few thousand people that just subscribe to my emails that are in Constant Contact, but not in Quickbooks. I could use Quickbooks to send my emails, but it wouldn’t give me all the functionality that Constant Contact does: like subscriber and opt out management, link and click-through tracking and other statistical data. It takes a bit more time to keep it all up-to-date, but it might be worth it.
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
I’m not saying I would spend my money on it, but for your budget, I found one from SuperMediaStore. It’s a 1 to 5 DVD tower for $379. Just remember, you get what you pay for……
SuperMediaStore DVD Duplicator (Economic Line)
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
What operating system?
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
Lots of options, but these are the first three that come to my mind:
Constant Contact (https://www.constantcontact.com)
Campaigner (https://www.campaigner.com)
iContact (https://www.icontact.com)I’ve been using Constant Contact for a few years and am pretty happy with it. I only use basic features, so there may be better options depending on what you are looking to do and what features you need.
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com -
I am certainly not an expert in this area, but I have had quite a bit of luck over the past two years getting my site to rank well in search engines.
I am sure some of what I have to say is completely wrong, but this is just based on my experiences. I would be curious to learn form others as well.
First, as others suggested, create a (free) listing on Google Local (https://local.google.com/). This will provide immediate help. This tells Google your business exists and gives them detail about you. When people do searches on google, local business results get favored well, so you want to be here. Most other major search engines have similar services, so submit your info to both of them. This alone should help a lot, or at least does in most cases.
Secondly, I noticed a few things about your website.
– The overall construction is built with frames and tables. Bots don’t like these as it confuses them. Using CSS based layouts and styles will separate your content from your styling and layout and makes your site easier to index and organize for search engines.– A lot of your titles/headers are images, which makes it difficult for bots to understand your content, thus possibly ranking your content lower. Using text for titles and headers and using appropriate H1,H2, etc tags can make it easier for bots to organize and rank your content.
Also, submit an XML site maps to each of the major search engines. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/) which helps you manage your site’s relationship with them. You can make this yourself or there are tools out there that can generate them for you (coffeecup software makes one of them, but I’m sure there are others). This tells the search engines what pages exist and help them crawl them faster. It also gives you stats for crawling and indexing.
Having good, unique and appropriate titles for every page in your site is also important. Supposedly, meta keywords don’t matter, but I still keep them up anyways…just in case. 🙂
And of course, the more traffic you get to your site, the higher your site will be ranked in most search engines. This is the big catch 22, because it’s hard to increase traffic without having high search rankings, but if you get creative it will happen in time. It’s taken me almost 2 years, and now I rank in the top 3 results for almost all of my target keywords for my geographic region.
It’s a continual process that will constantly get better if you keep working at it. Results won’t happen overnight.
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Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com