10th Apr 2014 | Email, General Information, Transferring, Web Hosting, Websites
Many of you who have grown up with the internet will be aware of the DynDNS service.
This allowed you to host services from home and get to them with a website address that ended .dyndns.com (or one of a variety of other endings). Mine was jd10k.dyndns.com.
Very soon it will be no more. Dyn want you to subscribe to their ‘Pro’ service, at $25 per year! (There is a temporary, discount.)
There are other options. A similar free service is provided by no-ip for free!
But perhaps you were hosting your email and/or website from home (not the best idea), in that case you might want to check out our low-priced email and web services on WebHost. You may want to add a personal domain name to that, too. You can do all that and still save on the price of the Dyn offering (and a personal domain name will look far more professional).
Anyway, there are lots of better options that signing up for Dyn’s service. Good luck!
Time for a change.
28th Mar 2014 | cPanel, Web Hosting, Websites
We are very pleased to offer high-speed, reliable hosting… but you wanted more. Our customers were telling us that they wanted cPanel.
cPanel is a ‘control panel’ that lets you set up all the features of your website hosting and email. It is used but a lot of hosting companies. We have it with the added twist of an improved user interface. (For those of you familiar with cPanel, it used to be a trip back to the 1990’s.)
This is available now, for less than £2.50 per month for our basic package (which is more than enough for most websites). If you are a multi-site guru, you might want our deluxe package, which starts at less than £4.40 per month.
These even include email.
To get them, before they appear on our main web host site, just go to: https://cloud-genius.com/website-hosting/ and choose the required hosting in the right-hand panel. (If you are on a mobile device, the hosting may be below the main content of the page.)
Once they appear on our main page, we will have to put the price up, so get in now!
24th Mar 2014 | Charity, Eventbrite, Salesforce
Lots of firms and charities use Eventbrite for their events and Salesforce for their customer relationship management.
Makes sense – Eventbrite makes it really easy to set up, advertise and sell your events. Once people turn up, there are lots of easy, quick, simple ways to sign people in.
Salesforce is the number one CRM system for keeping track of your donors, customers or anyone else who engages with your system.
You want to know how to import your Eventbrite data into your Salesforce. Easy, there is a free tool that will import your events one by one! To update your events you have to run it against each of your events – one by one. THERE MUST BE AN EASIER WAY!
There is!
The Cloud Genius connector will scan all your Eventbrite events and use the data to update your campaign members. If the people do not exist in your database you have the choice to either have them created as Leads or Contacts (with an associated account, too).
It does all your jobs in one hit, can run regularly throughout the day and is really economical in terms of API calls.
Better than that it uses advanced data cleansing techniques to reduce the amount of dud data brought into your Salesforce environment. (You can even set a list of account names to be ignored.) It also works with the Non Profit Starter Pack installed.
For more information, just contact us.
19th Mar 2014 | Autoresponder, Defeating spam
As a child I came across the saying: Fire is a good servant but a poor master.
I think that saying rings true even more of computers.
Most people seem to be slave to their computers, rather than getting the computers to do the work.
An auto-responder is a great way to put computers to work. As any good person in marketing knows, you have to keep in contact with your ‘prospects’. People rarely buy from you the first time they talk to you. I know marketing gurus who have fantastic systems of sending out emails one after the other, ‘warming’ up the prospect ready for the ‘sales chat’. They reckon that six is the magic number of contacts.
Imagine the computer could do that for you. It is a process, so perfect for automation.
The person signs up to a list. They get a sequence of emails, starting from that day, that address their particular need. If they respond to an email, it comes to you, so you can deal with them personally.
With a bit of creativity you can use this as a service to them. Imagine they want a reminder to do something every day for a week. You can set up a series of emails that go out on the seven days following their sign-up. You check ‘the system’, in this case aWeber to see how far they are through the sequence.
Supposing that on day 3 they make a purchase. The sequence is no longer valid for them. You can make it so that when they sign up for your product they are automatically taken off the old list.
You have an event comes up. You want to send an email to all your lists. You want do avoid duplicates where people are on more than one list. No problem… or you want to send to all people on a particular list UNLESS they have already made a purchase. Easy!
You want emails to go down on particular days before an event, reminding people to book. Simple!
You want to integrate this data into your Salesforce leads. There is a free app for that!
Suddenly you have a lot more time for following up those personal contacts. The rest is on ‘auto’.
For more information about any of this, just contact me!
28th Feb 2014 | General Information
As someone who runs a small business, I have to keep my eye on market trends.
I am currently in the midst of trying out various marketing software. Over the coming weeks I will let you know how I get on.
Over the past couple of weeks I have been putting Send Pepper (Pro) through its paces. I comes with a free two week trial, so I had high hopes. People do not normally offer free trials unless a product works well. I was particularly interested in the way it can automate certain processes… and how it could automatically track incoming and outgoing emails.
The interface was lovely and crisp. It lost a few points because it only really likes working in Firefox. (I thought the days of browser preference were behind us.) I liked the interface, very simple to understand and snappy.
It seemed to have the capability to track clients progress through my website with astonishing, almost creepy, abilities. I did not get a chance to fully test this, but others inform me that it really is amazing. I have no reason to doubt them.
A feature that I did get to test was Send Pepper’s ability to attach emails to client records. After a time a blank email would attach itself to my contacts and sometimes the full email would appear after a couple of hours. Other times not. Call in the techs. First level very helpful, then it went to second level and the devs. At this point the company became less communicative. To me attaching emails is core functionality and it did not work. But, I use a Mac perhaps that was doing something nasty. I have never had any issues with similar functionality in other products I have tried. On the other hand, I used to be in charge of a department that dealt with email filtering for the financial industry. We got used to knowing the vagaries of different systems and documenting the work-arounds. I could not see anything here that was unusual enough that they would not have come across it before.
“I was prepared for any suggestion of a solution, even if it meant that I needed to reconfigure something with my email service provider or on my Mac.
I will never know.”
I got to the end of my two week trial and it was still not working. I asked for an extension to the free period and made it clear that I would be leaving rather than paying for a faulty product. The tech took this to his manager who refused. I closed the account. The money would have been taken automatically from my account. I did not have the time to go chasing for a refund. I do have a business to run!
Send Pepper (Pro) is a single-user product that costs nearly $200 per month, cannot cope with currencies other than US dollars (well, there are “sort-of” work-arounds), and the iPhone app is only available on the US store. There is are upgrades in the pipeline, but looking at other reviews these seem to have been promised for more than a year.
At the end of the day, for me to trust my business to a product I need reliability. Full-stop. Send Pepper did not deliver on this crucial point.
18th Feb 2014 | General Information
Imagine you have a website with a sign-up page. Someone (or something) signs up on your site and expresses interest in your product.
What next?
In old way of doing things, you would look at the information, perhaps drop them an email and, if they were interested, follow up from there.
There are so many problems with that, not least the problem with ‘spambots’ automatically signing up to anything they can find. More junk to deal with.
So, the next line in your armoury is to put on a reCAPTCHA onto your form. You know, one of those unreadable things that proves you are a human being. Problem is, some of the spambots CAN read those things and some human beings cannot. I know that after I have mis-read one of those a few times I give up trying.
There must be a better way!
Fortunately there is. There are ‘auto-responders’. What one of these does is when someone signs up it sends a welcome message and asks them to confirm that they intended to sign up. This has two benefits:
- It stops spambots dead
- It stops people signing up (fraudulently or for a joke) for other people.
If the person does not respond then they do not end up on your list. No reCAPTCHA, and a significant reduction in fake leads. Better still, you do not end up bothering people who are not interested in your product.
Additional benefit: if you are offering advice/information you can set up a sequence of emails that follow up on the lead… AND you can automatically import the lead information into your Salesforce leads.
Our preferred autoresponder is aWeber. (Warning: this is an affiliate link.) There are others, but aWeber has a rock-solid reputation and an extremely high ‘deliverability’ rate. In other words, their emails are rarely blocked as spam (because they are sending information from companies that leads have actually signed up to and those leads really want the information). Pricing starts at just $19 per month.
We have been setting up some other clever things with this service… but more of that next time.
23rd Jan 2014 | Security and Safety
Remote support: It’s like magic the first time you see it. An IT support person takes over your computer and starts moving your cursor around your screen, even though they are in a different continent.
Here at Cloud Genius we have been comparing different solutions. Finally, we have picked a winner. We have to support people using Macs, PCs and Linux. The product we have chosen does all this admirably. (One of the contenders was particularly bad on Mac to Mac connections.)
Notable:
- It is good with all sorts of computer to computer connection.
- It allows computer to computer audio without the use of the phone or Skype.
- Very fast connection times
On every other feature it seemed to be equal or better than all the rivals. All the connections are encrypted with state of the art encryption. The client can end the ‘call’ at any time. If necessary roles can be reversed to show the support technician’s screen.
It even does video/audio/screen conferencing!
Anyway, you need concern yourself no further – just know that you will get the best remote support from Cloud Genius.
The winner? TeamViewer.com
17th Jan 2014 | Salesforce
Where did you stick all the new stuff?
One of the (many) fantastic things about Salesforce is its amazing pace of development. It is one of the reasons why consultants, admins, etc are subjected to exams three times a year. Some of the changes are new features, others are refinements of existing features. Amazingly, well due to good planning and design, Salesforce manages to introduce these features without down time and without breaking existing customisation. BUT, and its a big but, all of these features have to go into the menu. For some time, the existing menu has been creaking with new features. Many items are in the locations they are, because it made sense when they were developed. It is time for a change!
In Summer 2013 Salesforce introduced a new menu. As with all their new features, it is not forced on you, you just have to switch it on when you are ready. New Orgs have the new menu ‘on’ by default, so it is time to get used to it.
Here, for admins, is a great guide to switching on the menu and, even better, a chart showing you where to find all the old items. (We may have hated the old menu, but we knew where everything was!)
New Salesforce Menu Guide
28th Dec 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
For some reason (and believe me, I am not complaining) business has been brisker than usual over December. It seems to be that it is a time when people start thinking about the New Year and new beginnings. So, just before Christmas, a friend of mine set me a challenge. “I have a bit of a blog on blogspot.co.uk (Blogger) and I would like it on my new WordPress website.”
[ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://saintlaika.com’]Challenge 1 was the more than 6000 posts. (He and his community has really used his blog.) Now, I could see how to import the items, using WordPress’s import facility but then he said, Challenge 2 ‘…and I need the old blog forwarded to the new one.’
I did say that I would have to look into it. That is not necessarily what I was thinking, but…
Fortunately, there is a BRILLIANT plug-in for that from rtcamp.com.
Not only did this allow the forwarding of his old blog to the new website, but it mapped all the articles on the old site to the new one!
So, if you were to click on:
https://revjph.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-renativity-of-saint-laika.html
You would end up at:
https://saintlaika.com/2013/12/24/the-renativity-of-saint-laika/
The exact right article on the new blog.
So do not fear that you are trapped into your old Blogspot account – it can easily be moved to a shiny new WordPress website. I even managed to import 6000+ posts and 40,000+ comments. (His site has had over 3,000,000 hits!)
What did you do over Christmas?
Whatever you did, have a Happy New Year.
NB Sequences explained in this article do take longer in real life 😉
23rd Dec 2013 | General Information
Imagine losing all of your files… and all of your backups… and not being able to do a thing to get them back unless you pay a ransom.
That is what CryptoLocker does. You may pick it up from an email attachment or from a spurious ‘downloading’ site. It hides on your computer encrypting everything… but letting you access it seamlessly. Finally, it completes encrypting everything and it tells you that you have 72 hours to pay up.
If you do not pay up in time, the decryption key will be deleted and your files will be irretrievable.
Better than that, while your backups were connected it did the same thing to them… and your Dropbox account… and any new files you try to save.
72 hours to pay up or your business goes fizzle.
It doesn’t need you to be logged in as administrator.
It cannot be detected by anti-malware software.
Time for some good practices – no downloading from ‘download’ sites. No opening of email attachments unless you are sure of the identity of the sender. (You may want to institute digital signatures for your email, to guarantee that you are getting emails from who you think you are. We can assist you with that, but really we wanted you to know of this SERIOUS threat.)
Read more about it at:
https://www.zdnet.com/cryptolockers-crimewave-a-trail-of-millions-in-laundered-bitcoin-7000024579/
I was terrified. You should be too.
