Building Traffic

Classifieds
You will be surprised at how much attention your site can receive from people responding to classified ads. Whether they are free or paid ads there are a plethora of sites such as Craigslist, Kijii, Oodle, Backpage and USFreeAds. Local newspapers are also a great way to receive attention, especially if your business is local or regional. Classified ads are a low-cost or even free way to drive traffic to your site. There are classifieds in every sector of every industry and they can help to generate the kind of highly targeted traffic that creates opportunities and revenue.

Content Production
We live in the Information Age, and in addition to the traditional products and services that your business produces you are also required to generate information. Not just reports, but also content about what your business does. Search Engines thrive on text that is new or has been recently revised. Once your content is produced why not submit it to an article directory? ArticleAlley.com, Buzzle.com and IdeaMarketers.com are just three of the more well known article directories.

Another great way to use content to drive traffic to your site is Google Knol, an online site that lets you “Share what you know…” and not incidentally provides superb incoming links to your site from Google. And because links from Google are valuable include them in your articles when you create content for Knol.

Windows 7 Tip
Need to get two non-overlapping windows on screen at the same time? Windows 7 makes it easy. Select the first window. Now press and hold the "Windows" key on your keyboard and press the left arrow key. The window will resize and cover the left half of the screen. Next, select the second window and repeat the process, only this time press the right arrow key. The result should be two equally sized windows that perfectly bisect the screen.

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Version Control

How to maintain sanity while several people on a team in multiple locations work on the same document over a period of days, weeks or months.

It’s happened to you. You’ve created a document — a memo or business letter — then sent it to a colleague for their input. They’ve made their changes and corrections and returned the document to you. So now you have two documents on your computer (maybe even with the same file name) and you have to compare the two to see how the original and revised versions differ. You say to yourself “There has got to be a better way!” Enter Version Control.

Version control is used by computer pros to track changes in projects. There’s no reason you can’t make use of this handy technology in your office.

If you work with a team when you are creating proposals, technical papers or other business documents then you can take advantage of the built-in change tracking system in programs you already own.

For example, do you and your fellow employees use Microsoft Word? Well, Word has a robust and easy-to-use change tracker — all you have to do is turn it on. Open MS Word (2003 or better) and click on Tools>Track Changes. A new tool bar will appear in Word. The icons are not terribly intuitive so float your cursor over each one to read a descriptive tooltip.

I’ve got Word 2003 on the computer I happen to be using to compose this article. The screenshots should be relatively similar in Word 2007. Let’s take a quick tour of the Track Changes toolbar from left to right .
Display For Review
Display For Review is a dropdown menu that allows you to choose several different views of the document. Choose from Original (no changes), Final (as if all changes were accepted and incorporated) and Final Showing Markup (all changes that have been made to the document).

Show
The Show dropdown menu allows you to adjust the amount of detail that is displayed about edits, revisions and comments.

One other tip: If you would like to see the alterations as balloons in the sidebar then select View>Print Layout from the Menu Bar. Otherwise you’ll have to turn on the Reviewing Pane. Not a big deal except that the Reviewing Pane eats up a lot of real estate at the bottom of your screen.

Previous, Next, Accept Change
The Previous, Next and Accept Change buttons are fairly self explanatory. You can see historical iterations of individual changes and then accept or reject them individually or en masse.

Reject Change/Delete Comment
The Reject Change control allows you to reject any editorial and formatting changes. You can also use it to remove comments.

Insert Comment
The Insert Comment button is a gem. Just select a chunk of text then click Insert Comment. The selected text will be highlighted and you can create your comment for all subsequent reviewers to see.

Highlighter
The Highlighter does pretty much what it says it does. Note that the highlighting will show up in the final document, not just on the Track Changes overlay.

Track Changes
The Track Changes control toggles version tracking on and off.

Reviewing Panel
Clicking the Reviewing Panel button pops open an area at the bottom of the screen that contains all of the comments and changes made to the document. My own take on it is that it wastes a lot of vertical screen space. Others may prefer it instead of looking at the small balloons and pop-ups in the document pane.

So there you have it. Version control for MS Word in a nutshell. If you are tasked with producing business documents that go through several departments, iterations and time frames, then version tracking will be a big help in getting the job done while saving your team time and a measure of sanity.