The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Been meaning to post this for a while. I get a lot of my images from Stock.Xchng. It’s sort of a member photo-sharing site like Flickr, only with built-in options for specifying usage guidelines and a section for paid stock imagery.

From their site:

Browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 250.000 quality stock photos by more than 25.000 photographers! Need a wallpaper for your desktop? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration? Have a look around.

Share your photos with fellow designers! SXC is a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to the public free of charge. If you have some nice photos that you’d like to share with others, join us!

Chat with other members in our forum! Looking for something? Need an opinion? Have a question? Post a topic, and someone will definitely help you out.

Now, since it’s a photo-sharing site, there’s a lot of variation in image quality available. But you can find some truly stunning, professional quality photographs downloadable in large, high-resolution files that you can use absolutely free. (Sometimes there are non-commercial use or artist-contact requirements - pay attention to the “Availability” notes on the image preview page before you decide to use the pic.) And their fee stock images are top-quality, too.

I love this site and it’s my go-to place when I need a shot for a blog post, like this one. Give it a try for yourself and see what you think.

Photo credit: Erik “P.Zado” Araujo

Tags: Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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Google’s Grand Central gives you a new phone number that you can set to call any phone, anywhere (or different phones depending on who’s calling, gives you an unlimited web-accessible voice mail box, let’s you listen in on callers to see what they want before picking up, offers one-touch recording, SMS message alerts and so much more.

[Read more →]

Tags: Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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I almost never sign up for (or if I do, keep) daily newsletters, mainly because they’re almost never value-positive enough to make up for filling my email box. But “Early to Rise” is one of my must-have e-newsletters.

Every day, the newsletter is full of investment tips, business advice and ideas, fitness news and much more. It’s a powerhouse of health, wealth and success information. It’s rare for me not to find something of value or interest in every issue, and more often than not I at least skim every section and come away with several new and useful bits of knowledge.

Over the next week and some, ETR is doing a “12 Days of Christmas Give-Away Bonanza.” In each of their issues, starting back on 12/24, there will be a link to a free downloadable pdf from one of their expert contributors. Downloads so far have included Your Best Holiday Season Ever (how to prepare your business - and your off-work time - to get the most out of the holidays), Living Rich (how to live like a millionaire without being one), How To Get Motivated… (a motivational ebook) and Make Up to $100,000 This Year… (12 ideas for making money).

Instead of linking to the downloads directly (I’m not sure if they are intended only for subscribers or not), I’m simply going to link to the “Early To Rise” archive page. Starting with 12/24 and working your way up, you should be able to read through the articles and spot the free downloads.

Note that the download links are scattered through the articles like Easter Eggs, rather than being set apart, so you have to pay attention and may have to do some hunting around (or just scan the links until you find the one’s labeled as Christmas gifts). But it’s worth the extra effort - not only are the downloads full of valuable information, but so are the newsletters themselves.

Enjoy!

Tags: Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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You know those expert sources you see quoted in newspaper and magazine articles? Ever dream of becoming so well-known in your field that reporters and writers were calling you on a regular basis to prattle on about share the wealth of your knowledge on your topic of interest? Ever wonder how you get on that “magic list” of on-call experts?

Well, here’s a little Christmas gift of insight from the writer in me to the business person in you: Sure, a writer may have a list of folks they use regularly, as well as a list of a few handy places they go to track down experts when they need a quote. But most of the time, we just write the article we planned on writing, then go Googling for an amenable expert or three with enough credibility not to make our editor’s eyes roll, and enough wit and conversational skill to deliver a few publishable soundbites.

And since most of us are “just some writer” to the big-name experts and need to get our quotes together before the heat death of the Universe (or 15 minutes before that, which is approximately when you’ll finally hear back from most celebrity sources’ agents), we often aim well outside the Deepak Chopra inner circle with our inquiries.

In short, you don’t have to be Dr. Phil to get quoted. You just have to be credible and visible. And it doesn’t hurt if you learn to speak in discrete nuggets of blinding brilliance, either.

Now, I can’t help you with that whole credibility thing - you’re on your own there - but I can give you a head start on the visibility factor by sending you to ProfNet.

ProfNet is basically a directory where professionals can sign up to be listed as available for contact by reporters, writers, researchers and whoever else needs to keep a stable of handy experts on call.

ProfNet is a part of PR Newswire, and your PR Newswire membership gets you ProfNet access free. There are currently over 75,000 journalists who are registered with the database. And through something called ProfNet Links, you can link to your ProfNet profile from any PR Newswire news release you put out. So, there’s plenty of opportunity for exposure.

If you’re ready to hang out your shingle as the go-to guru in your field of interest, this is probably as good an addition to your publicity strategy as any. I know of one colleague who got quoted in an article in Time Magazine through this service. So it’s certainly worth a try.

And who knows? Next time I’m writing up a feature article on the newly popular practice of interspecies hedgehog massage, I may just be giving one of you readers out there a call.

Tags: Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in 1999, which would seem to make it desperately obsolete if not downright antiquated by today’s fast-moving standards…except, it’s not.

What started out as an internet bitch-slap upside the head of clueless corporations who were either in denial of the way things were changing or trying to game the system rather than join it quickly went from an online bitchfest to a marketing phenomenon as the manifesto became a book, which became a viral message, which became a movement.

Although it was written over 7 years ago as of this posting, the content remains as fresh as the day it was enpixelated, primarily because A) corporate mindsets are glacially slow when it comes to adaptation and change, and B) new businesses are being minted left and right by people who have been cloistered behind the culturally monastic walls of corporate America for most of their working life and who are no more prepared to fight their way out of this particular wet paper bag than their previous bosses are.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto are discussions on everything from doing business in the conversation economy and how to really screw it up, to dealing with an enlightened, incredibly intelligent workforce each of whom probably represents more brain capital on a bad day than the businesses entire historical line-up of executive level officers combined, all laid out in an edgy, direct lingua franca that never lets propriety get in the way of delivering their message with vigor and clarity.

In short, this is the unabridged, user-created wiki manual for doing business in the 21st century, and if you haven’t read it you’re missing out on a lot of very vital information.

And here’s the cool part. You can click the graphic link above if you’d prefer to have a hard-copy version (and send me some kick-back love in the process), but if you’re not adverse to reading book-length copy on-screen, the entire Cluetrain Manifesto is available online for free.

So now you have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing how this new reality works and how to function within it. Don’t make me come back there.

Tags: Business, Conversation Economy, Resources and Tools, Reviews, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Here’s an interesting site - Hard to Find Seminars features 117 free interviews with marketing and business experts. The “catch” is that you have to hand over a valid email address - and yes, that means they’ll probably send you umpty-billion marketing emails, so be smart and use your junkmail address and unsubscribe if the mailings don’t work for you (I’ve just signed up myself, so I don’t know the full extent of the potential spamination, but I’ll update if it’s egregious or illegal or anything).

But that’s a lot of marketing and business brain-picking for free, and if you do use a junkmail account you don’t have much to lose, so why not give it a shot?

Note: what you get is streaming audio, not downloads, so this only makes sense for those who have a big enough pipe for that to work well.

Tags: Business, Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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Online Copywriting 101

Great post chock full of resources and tools for anyone who’s running a blog, website or other online presence. A veritable Swiss Army Knife of copywriting goodness.

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Resources and Tools by Soni Pitts
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