I forget things. A lot.

It’s sad, but true… just ask my wife: my short term memory holds about as much as information as an old school floppy disk (note to the kids out there: that’s not a lot).

There are certain times when my memory really shines, and I’ll pull out some obscure detail of an event months or even years ago that impresses not only my wife, but blows me away as well. Unfortunately, I have yet to unlock the pattern that triggers these sudden feats of recollective strength.

Until I crack the code, I’ve come to rely pretty heavily on ReQall, a service that has quickly become indispensable.

ReQall does what it’s endearingly misspelled name suggests: it helps you recall virtually anything you might be in danger of forgetting. The reason this service is so powerful is that it employs speech-to-text technology that lets you record a reminder using one of ReQall’s mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. The reminder is then translated to text and added to your list based on various parameters.

More on that later.

Organizing Items With ReQall

ReQall has a simple, yet ingenious organization structure that classifies items into different groups such as To-Do’s, Notes, Shopping items and any custom categories you might want to create.

You can then view your tasks based on these criteria, in addition to time based lists, such as Today, Soon, Later, and Overdue.

This works really well, because it allows you to view items based on your current needs. Need your To-List for today? Just pull up the “Today” screen. Stopping at the store? Just hit the “Shopping” tab.

Another excellent feature enjoyed by Pro customers (an incredibly useful service for a mere $2.99 a month) is the addition of “Locations.”

When you first open a ReQall account, you get a brief trial period where you have access to this (and other) premium features. At first, you have two default locations: “Home” and “Work.”

Adding an item, either by text or voice (yes, it works with both) that ends with “at home,” or “at work,” will automatically assign the event to that location – and you can create whatever locations you want.

Here’s an example: I pick up my phone, hit record and say “Water the plants at home.”

ReQall uploads that audio file to their server, translates it to text and saves it as “Water the plants.” The note is tagged under the “Home” location so it will show up on that list if I need it.

ReQall also understands dates, times and scheduling – meaning I can easily remind myself to do something in the future such as “Call Mom tomorrow at 5PM” (will save itself as “Call Mom” with tomorrow’s date at 5 o’clock – so it won’t show up on today’s to-do list).

Recurring tasks are also easy. Simply type or say “Balance business checking account every Monday,” and the event will be created on a recurring basis.

Adding in a number of locations for different stores you frequent allows for automatically organized shopping lists – such as adding “Buy printer paper at Staples” or “Buy milk at Whole Foods.” The “Shopping” tab will display all of these items together, while the specific locations will break out the individual lists for you.

Add in GPS functionality that will give you an optional audio and pop up alert when you come into range of a saved location, and you’re set to remember pretty much anything.

Here And Now

The biggest area of improvement at the moment would have to be ReQall’s “Here and Now” feature. The name implies that it would produce a list of current items for your current location – unfortunately that’s not quite how it works.

According to ReQall support, the feature actually works more as a “Here OR Now” list – meaning it shows everything that can be done at the current time OR at the current location – meaning you’ll sometimes have something on the list that isn’t due for a couple of weeks, but it’s there because you’re at that location.

Fine tuning that feature into a genuine “Here AND Now” layout that showed today’s tasks for wherever you are would make this service an absolute powerhouse.

Fortunately, ReQall has a fairly responsive support staff (they use GetResponse for online support correspondence) and they’ve had a number of requests to update this feature. Fingers crossed!

In short, ReQall is extremely useful for organizing both personal and business reminders. It makes adding items to your current and future to-do and shopping lists extremely simple to do on the fly – and the web interface makes composing a complete list all at once extremely easy as well.

Testing and tracking are vital components of successful internet marketing.

Think about how much time you spend writing content, posting ads, commenting on forum topics, and other forms of driving traffic. If you aren’t tracking your site’s traffic to see which methods are working and which aren’t, how will you ever know what you’re doing right and what needs improving?

How will you know which ads are making you money, and which ads are costing you money?

The simple answer is: You won’t.

You NEED to be tracking the visitors who come to your site. How did they get there? If they found you through a search engine, what keyword were they searching? What page did they land on? How long did they stay on your site? How many other pages did they look at?

These are all vital questions that need to be answered if you want an accurate picture of how effective your marketing is.

Fortunately, there is an easy and free way to gather all of this data, called Google Analytics. Analytics is an online tracking system that logs all of the traffic on your site, which you can then organize into reports and analyze, allowing you to improve your marketing and your results.

What are some of the different traffic aspects tracked by Analytics?

• Number of visits
• Number of page views
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• Referring Websites
• Referring Keywords (both paid and organic)
• Goal Conversion

…just to name a few.

By gathering all of this data, you can effectively figure out what is working on your site, and what isn’t.

For example, what if a large number of visitors were landing on a specific page of your site after searching for a certain keyword, but none of them stayed long enough to read anything? That’s useful information. It tells you that your page is relevant enough in the eyes of the search engine, but not in the eyes of the visitor – so maybe testing a different headline will get them to stay.

That’s just one example, but here’s another, for those of you using Google Adwords. With Analytics, you can track all search traffic, or you can look at organic and paid traffic separately. What if you found a keyword that was bringing organic traffic to a specific page on your site, and getting a good response? Wouldn’t you want to start bidding on that keyword for that landing page in your Adwords campaigns? What if one of your Adgroups was failing miserably, but the keywords for that group were doing really well on a different page of your site for organic searches?

The amount of power that you gain by monitoring your site’s traffic is indescribable. Without a tool like Analytics, you’re left completely in the dark… posting ads and content and hoping for the best. Learning to track your website traffic and marketing efforts will allow you to focus on the money making activities and you will find that you become much more productive!

Sometimes when working online you need to grab an image of something on your screen. It could be anything from a logo, to a screenshot or a short demo video for a team member. The problem is that grabbing that on-screen content isn’t always easy.

Let’s face it, taking a screen shot, copying it into an image editor, cropping and resizing the image, saving it, attaching it to an email… is just way too much work!

So, what’s the solution?

Jing Screen Capture Software

Jing Project (or just “Jing”) is an incredibly lightweight screen capture software tool designed to simplify the process of saving and sharing the things that happen on your computer screen. The basic version is available for free at JingProject.com.

Once installed, Jing takes the form of a small yellow sun. When not in use, that sun sits at the edge of your screen so it’s out of the way (I tend to forget it’s there until I need it for something). Whenever you need to capture something, simply move your mouse over the little yellow sun and three “rays” will appear with “Capture,” “History,” and “More” buttons that look like the picture to the right.

Clicking capture will allow you to select the area of your screen you want by clicking and dragging. Then it’s a simple matter of selecting whether you want an image or a video.

Image Screen Capture

Once you select an area to capture by clicking and dragging across your screen – with Jing conveniently measuring the size of the area you’ve selected – you can take a snapshot of your screen with a single click. Jing then provides a preview of the image that you can save, delete or edit.

If you need to add to the image you’ve captured, Jing provides tools to easily add arrows, boxes, highlighting and captions. Once your image is good to go, all you have to do is save and share it.

In terms of sharing, you can easily add buttons to post your image to your twitter, facebook, or flickr account – as well as options to copy the image to your clipboard so you can paste it wherever you want (even if you haven’t saved it!) or upload it to your web server via FTP.

Basically, Jing makes it easy to quickly take any portion of your computer screen and move it to wherever you might need it.

Video Screen Capture

If an image is worth a thousand words, video has to be pretty valuable too… which is why Jing makes it just as easy to record video of the action on your screen as it is to capture an image.

After selecting the capture area, simply click the video button and start recording! Jing will capture anything on your screen for up to five minutes at a time (you can, of course make multiple recordings if you need to). The recording can be paused while you move between windows or prepare your presentation, and then saved in .swf format when it’s complete.

To easily share the video with others, there is a single click button to upload the video to ScreenCast.com – on of Jing’s sister products from TechSmith. Videos can also be edited in Camtasia (also from TechSmith) with a single click.

Jing Pro edition unlocks additional features to allow for even more sharing options, and the option to record videos as .mp4 files, rather than .swf – making them more accessible to other viewing and editing programs, but for most users the basic free version is enough to save a TON of time.

Video marketing is a phenomenal way to spread your message and network.

People love videos, search engines love videos, they are simply one of the best ways to drive traffic on today’s internet – if you know what you’re doing.

Putting your videos up on YouTube is a great start. It’s the most popular of the video sharing platforms and gets a lot of attention.

That doesn’t mean it is the only platform you want to use. There are literally dozens of other sites that you can use to share your content and increase the links and traffic to your site, but who has time to create accounts and submit the same content to dozens of sites at a time, over and over again?

You do….and we’ll explain how.

Let us introduce you to an automation tool called Traffic Geyser.

With Traffic Geyser you can create a video, upload it to your Traffic Geyser account and submit it to as many or as few sites as you want, all at once. Traffic Geyser allows you to add descriptions, keywords, categories, and everything else you need to your videos, and then submits that content to all of the sites you have entered into your account.

Traffic Geyser doesn’t end with video submission. They also provide extensive marketing training, capture page creation, royalty free audio and graphics resources – the list goes on and on.

Check out Traffic Geyser for yourself to learn more about how it can help you take your current video marketing strategies to the next level.

Traffic Geyser is in the middle of a 3 day product launch right now for their FirePower Business Builder package, where they teach you how to take your passion and turn it into an online business. It’s a great product and they are offering it for a limited time only and at a huge discount if you are interested

If you are simply interested in the monthly subscription for video distribution, it will be available after the launch!