Premium Spotlight
Online Project Management Made Easy With ProWorkflow
If you own a creative or tech service business, you know how difficult it can be to manage projects, staff and your clients. You have to keep your team organised, manage and assign tasks to staff, distribute information, keep clients up to date on progress and ensure quotes and invoices get sent out on time. The most important aspect of this is that you need a communication channel where your team and your clients can collaborate on projects and tasks.
Many online workers rely on their email account and perhaps a spreadsheet to keep track of their projects and communicate with the other members of the team. However, as soon as you start managing more than a handful of projects and clients or have to work whilst on the move then emails and spreadsheets aren’t going to cut it. You will inevitably start looking for some form of robust project management software.
ProWorkflow is an online project management software tool which allows you to manage all of your projects from a central location. ProWorkflow is currently helping many thousands of customers globally to optimize their business processes, manage staff resources, track projects, tasks and time and keep on top of it all!
Let’s see the features of ProWorkflow.com in full detail:
Features of ProWorkflow.com
When you first login to ProWorkflow, you will see the following dashboard:
The dashboard consists of 4 main expandable sections – Projects, Tasks, Time and Invoicing. Then there is a navigation sidebar which contains many more options to manage your projects, create or assign tasks and perform other activities.
The “Search” section, placed at the right top of the screen lets you search for projects, tasks, companies, contacts and notes. This is handy, when you quickly want to know the details about a particular project, task or client.
The “Recent Items” column lists all the recent activity of your account. It shows the projects and tasks you were recently working on so you can save valuable time by jumping straight to the item you need.
The Projects Section
The projects section allows you to create and manage your projects. You can access the Projects section from your dashboard or from the sidebar.
Clicking “New Project” opens a new browser pop up window where you can add all the details regarding your project. This includes adding a title, client, specifying a category, choosing priority, adding deadlines and more. There is a WYSiWYG editor which lets you add a description to your project.
In addition you can add more staff to your project and choose a project manager. Staff added to your projects will automatically get an email notification that they have been assigned to upcoming project or task.
When you have finished adding all the details, you can start adding tasks from the “Project Details” page. You can also enclose a variable in the task name to help better identify tasks.
Adding time to tasks is easy. Just click the time link next to any task to add time, either manually or through a start/stop time tracker.
The recorded time is attached to the task and added to the total time spent for the project. In addition it’s added to the user’s weekly timesheet. There are plenty of time summary reports you can access later if needed.
One of the great time saving features is the ‘Edit All Tasks’ screen where you can bulk edit your project’s tasks. Use this screen to assign tasks to staff, add start and due dates, allocated times and a task description:
I particularly liked that most information on the “Project Details” page could be edited by inline editing – double clicking where the fields show green:
Send Messages to Your Team Members
The “Message” section lets you send quick messages to all or some of your Team members. To send a message, click “Add” under the Message panel and this will open a WYSIWYG editor where you can type the message and send it to selected staff.
The messages sent can be set as private or public and there is an option to send an email as well as just have the message appear on screen. The messaging in ProWorkflow is a great way to collaborate on a project as all project members are on the same page, literally! Conversations are stored and archived with the project so there’s no more hunting around or missing emails.
Upload Files and Documents to Share with your Team Members
The “Files” section lets you create folders and upload files from your computer. You can upload images, documents or any other file which you want to share with other members working on the same project. Files can also be uploaded to individual tasks.
The File sharing feature is useful for two reasons. First, your uploaded files can be organized in folders and sub-folders so you can quickly share a folder with any team member and let him view or download any files that he may need. Second, all the uploaded files are kept safe in your ProWorkflow account and you don’t have to use third party websites for uploading your files.
Project Timeline
The Project timeline lets you list all the projects and tasks which are assigned to a particular day of the work calendar. The timeline is similar to a gantt chart and can be a great help with planning workflow. You can also use the timeline to see the workload for a particular staff member, project or client.
The project timeline is a very easy way to know how much work is pending, how much progress has been made and what tasks may be due or needing work done on a particular day.
Create and Manage Invoices
You can create invoices from ProWorkflow’s “Invoicing” section and manage the billing. An Invoice can be made from a quote, from a project’s tracked time, a date range of time tracked or manually. Here is how the invoice panel of ProWorkflow appears:
We’ve only scratched the surface of what this powerful application is capable of. To find out more and try for yourself, sign up for a ProWorkflow account here or get the free 14 day trial account here
Why Use ProWorkflow for Project Management?
Although there are a lot of web based project management applications, here are a few reasons why you should choose ProWorkflow for managing your projects:
1. You can have unlimited projects, tasks, clients and contractors!
2. ProWorkflow is highly configurable, the look and feel of the application can be tailored to match your brand and a range of settings allow you to optimize ProWorkflow to suit your business. Administrators also have granular control of user permissions for both staff and clients.
3. ProWorkflow extends beyond its web application with iCal integration, a free iPhone app and desktop Time Tracker. They also offer a range of invoicing integrations as well as a fully featured API for custom development.
4. Projects, tasks, invoices and quotes can be easily created using templates.
5. There is a dedicated help center with video guides to help you get started with ProWorkflow and learn more.
The monthly pricing of ProWorkflow is as per industry standards and they have 3 different plans to choose from. You can view the complete pricing plans and feature comparisions at this page. ProWorkflow is a well established solution – in this competitive space it’s good to know that there is a company that has been around for almost ten years.
Best 10 Cheap Web Hosting Providers (According To WebHostingRating.com)
If you own a website and have your own domain name registered, chances are that you also have a hosting provider where you have uploaded all the files of your website. It’s very important on the part of bloggers or webmasters to choose a reputed hosting provider for their business.
Using a good web hosting provider ensures that your website is running smoothly and do not face any down times or server side problems.
But before you choose a hosting provider, you must research and compare all the companies out there. The following points should be closely compared while choosing a web hosting company:
- Is the hosting company a reputed one ?
- What other users are saying about the company ?
- What are the different plans available ?
- How is the tech support of the company?
- Which sites are using the same hosting company for their websites?
- What are the user reviews, goodwill and customer feedback of the hosting company?
To accumulate all the data about the different hosting providers is really a tough task. You have to search Google, go to the forums and interact with different people to know the inside details of the hosting company.
One site which makes the research much more easier is WebHostingRating.com. WebHostingRating is one of the world’s largest independent web hosting directory which contains detailed information of all the major hosting providers at one place. You can read the user reviews and customer feedback of all the popular and trusted hosting companies from a single website and don’t have to look here and there and collect information.
The site also has some useful hosting guides which will help you choose the perfect web hosting company according to your needs.
Let’s see the various sections of the website in full detail.
Compare the Plans of Different Hosting Providers
On the home page of WebHostingRating.com, you will see a brief comparison of 10 major hosting providers, as shown below:
The above table compares different aspects such as the basic pricing plans, space and traffic. There is a user rating column which lists a link to reviews page written by real users who are using the same hosting provider for their website(s).
The comparison is very handy and you can compare different companies at a glance. If you want to compare the plans of two or more companies, simply select the corresponding check boxes under the compare section and and hit the “Compare plans” button placed at the bottom of the table.
The result will be something like the following:
No doubt this is useful, because you can compare all the aspects of two hosting companies side by side. It would be a lot more easier on part of customers to first compare the plans, features and then choose the company that suits best.
Know the Complete Details of a Specific Hosting Provider
If you are interested in a specific hosting company and want to know the complete details, simply perform a search at the search box. WebHostingRating.com contains the details of all the major hosting providers, so you will surely find the company you are looking for.
On the company page you will find lots of details about the features the hosting company provides. This includes server information, domain features, email features, site management, scripting, security, ecommerce, site building tools and site statistics.
The page will also list the different pricing plans and user reviews about the company. This is extremely useful because you can read the reviews and know what other customers are saying about the company. After reading the feedback, it would be lot easier to decide why you should choose this company as the hosting provider of your website.
Search Using the Catalog
Another useful feature is the “Search Host Catalog” section placed at the sidebar of WebHostingRating.com. It’s an advanced search which lets you pick certain attributes and then search the website for companies that matches with your chosen attribute. There are two attributes – price range and the location of the hosting provider.
For example: If you want a hosting company from North America and in the price range of 5-10$ a month, you can simply define the attributes in the “Search Host Catalog” section and search for the hosting company which satisfies those conditions.
Hosting Guides
The Hosting Guides section of WebHostingRating.com consists of useful tutorials and articles about Web hosting. If you are facing any problem regarding the technical aspects of your website, these guides will be useful.
In addition to the tutorials, the hosting guides section also consists of articles about the current trends in the web hosting industry. Following these guides and articles, you will find the answer to commonly asked questions and problems.
Video Tutorials
The Video tutorials section is one of the very informative sections of WebHostingRating.com. Sometimes you may have to spend a lot of time fixing bugs, you may mess your website’s settings or get into other problems.There are a lot of tutorials on the web but you have to read long pages of content which might not be the easiest way to find a solution you are looking for.
To make it straightforward for you, WebHostingRating presents a full list of Video Tutorials. There are a lot of categories – from CMS to C panel from FTP to Gallery, from WordPress to Plesk – everything’s under their grip.
All the tutorials are listed in the left sidebar, pick a category and view interactive video tutorials for free.
Submit Your Hosting Company to WebHostingRating.com
If you have a hosting company and want to get listed in the WebHostingRating.com directory, go to the submit page and enter all the details and whereabouts about your company. The team of WebHostingRating.com will review your service and add it to their directory.
It’s a great way to gain exposure and targeted customers because WebHostingRating is the place where lots of clients are coming everyday.
All in all, WebHostingRating.com is a useful source of information for anyone who is interested in web hosting. If you have a website and want to change your hosting provider, make sure you read the reviews about the hosting company at WebHostingRating.com and then come to a decision.
WebHostingRating is one of the world’s largest independent web hosting directory which contains detailed information of all the major hosting providers at one place. You can read the user reviews and customer feedback of all the popular and trusted hosting companies from a single website and don’t have to look here and there and collect information.
ForeUI – An Easy To Use Prototyping Tool For Designers And Developers
Designing prototypes for web applications can be tricky, you must have a good UI prototyping tool at your disposal. There are many prototyping tools available for Windows but if you are looking for an easy to use cross platform solution, try ForeUI.com.
ForeUI is an amazing UI prototyping tool meant for designers, programmers and anyone who needs a desktop tool to create screen mockups for web or desktop applications. You can use ForeUI.com desktop app to create a prototype of an application or a website.
The need of using a prototyping tool is when you have to verify the design with your clients or colleagues and then start the development process. You can use the prototype to write the documentation before starting the development phase or perform usability testing before coding and so on.
Download ForeUI
ForeUI is available for Windows and MAC operating systems and the latest version of ForeUI (2.3.2) can be downloaded from this page
Features of ForeUI Prototyping Tool
When you run the ForeUI desktop app, you see the following work interface:
The middle pane which is shown in white, acts as a board for holding all the elements of your mockup. You can drag and drop the different elements from the sidebar and adjust the position and styling of different elements as you want.
For example: I created a screen mock up of a simple HTML website by dragging and dropping the rectangle element from the sidebar. Following is a preview of the mockup:
Just double click an element from the left sidebar and it appears on the main pane for editing. Next, you can use your mouse to resize it or place it anywhere on the plot. The right sidebar lets you add style rules to the elements e.g adjusting the background color, position, border, width, height, layers and so on.
Here are all the properties of an element which you can tweak:
Next, I wanted to see how the prototype may look in the browser. ForeUI lets you export the mockup to image, PDF or DHTML formats, hence I chose the DHTML format and exported it in my desktop. Following is the result:
This is very useful, I can create the sample of a design and export the copy to PDF or DHTML formats. Then I can email the sample to my clients or developers and they can have a rough idea about my project.
The best part is that the mockup is Fidelity independent. You can always change the style by switching the UI theme and make adjustments as desired. Currently, ForeUI supports 5 UI themes – Windows XP, Windows 7, MAC OS X, Wireframing and Hand Drawing.
Changing the UI theme is very easy, all you have to do is select the theme from the UI theme dropdown as shown below:
The Action Editor : The Action editor in ForeUI lets you define the behaviour of each element in your plot. The behaviour can be a simple message, popup window, link or anything which you want the application to perform once the user interacts with the element.
To access the action editor, select an element and click the action button, shown by a flag:
This will open a pop up window where you can define the action of the element. Defining the action is fairly easy, you have to create a flowchart and add the logic and order of events in the flowchart.
For example: If on clicking a button, you want to show a dialog box containing a Yes / No button. If the user clicks the Yes button, the required action will be performed. If he clicks the No button, he will be returned to the current page.
In that case, you can create a simple If else conditional check and design the flow chart as follows:
Here is how the output will look like:
You can define more complex conditions and logics, this depends on what you want your prototype to perform once the user’s action triggers an event. The Action editor contains a lot of options to define conditional checking, adding different events e.g onclick, mouse hover and looping.
Once you are done with defining the logic and behavior of an element, you can run the simulation and your plot will run as a DHTML page in the browser.
This is really great, you can define how your application interacts with the user and do not have to code anything. Just create the mockup, add the rules and conditional checking and export it as a DHTML page. Then send it to your developers and ask them to do all the coding or design work.
You can also export the UI file of your plot and let your developers see the flowchart and the different order of events associated with a web element. The interactive design and flowchart model is really time saving.
Sharing Resources:
ForeUI supports packing a chosen part of your design as a custom element and exporting it. This is extremely useful when you want to share a part of your design or mockup with anyone.
Consider an example: You are designing a web application and want someone else to work on the site’s navigation. You have already designed the navigation and want the developer to add more features in it.
In that case, you can export the navigation as a custom element and send it to the developer. The developer can then import the custom element as a plot and customize it the way he wants. He can add more elements, events, conditional checking, modify the layout and colors and so on.
When he has finished modifying the custom element, he can export it and send it back to you. Then you can import the modified custom element in your prorotype.
The resource sharing feature is a lifesaver, you can divide the functional areas of your application to different developers. Let them develop the different elements on their own and then merge all the elements together in your prototype.
To export a custom element, click the “Resource sharing” button from the left sidebar. This will open a new popup window where you can sign in with your ForeUI account and share a resource with other users of the ForeUI comunity.
See Examples: At the ForeUI demo page, you can see some good examples of screen mockups and DHTML prototypes. Just click a thumbnail and the demo prototype will run in your browser.
Join the ForeUI Community
ForeUI has an active community of users at ForeUI.net, where you can meet and interact with other people who are already using the ForeUI application. You can download or upload resources from the ForeUI community for Free, this includes custom elements, libraries and plots .If you have any problems or need any help, you can ask questions, leave comments or start a discussion.
More information about using ForeUI is available on the official documentation page.
The free version of ForeUI lets you test all the features for 15 days. If you seriously need a full featured prototyping tool, it’s worth giving ForeUI a try.
Mavenlink – Cloud Based Software To Manage Your Projects And Clients
If you run an online business, you know how difficult it can be to manage different projects and work with multiple clients simultaneously. Your email is not the perfect place to store all the data because often things get mixed up and this may eventually hurt your business.
If you want a better way to organize your projects – you must use a project management system. A project management system gives you, your team members and your clients an online dashboard where you can see the development of a project and collaborate with multiple people and clients.
Mavenlink is an interactive workplace and one of the best companies to focus extensively on improving the interactions between business, consultants and clients. Using Mavenlink, you can manage all your projects from a central place, create timelines and documentation, accept contracts and manage your resources.
This saves you time and money and more importantly, your clients and team members enjoy the work flow and ease of use.
Mavenlink’s in built system guides you, your team members and your clients through out the completion of a project – from proposal to payment.
The Mavenlink Project Workspace
You can start using the Mavenlink project workspace by signing up for a free account here. Mavenlink also supports logging in using your Google or Google Apps account, Myspace, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL or using an Open ID.
Once you have signed up, login to your Mavenlink project workspace and you will see the Mavenlink dashboard as shown below:
The most prominent part of the dashboard is the projects section. This section contains a summary of the project status as well as the recent posts of the projects on which you are working.
To start working on a project, first you will have to create a workspace where you can add details about your project and invite clients or consultants to your workspace.
When the workspace is ready and you have invited the clients or consultants, you can start posting messages on the workspace and upload the necessary files. Your project collaborators will be able to view your message, comment on it or they can post a new message on the workspace.
This is very useful, all the conversations of a project are organized and you don’t miss any important message or guideline.
By default, the posts are visible to all the members of your project. However, you can choose that a post may go out to a specific member. The members of your project can reply to posts directly from their Email, without having to login to Mavenlink dashboard.
This is how the projects tab looks inside Mavenlink dashboard.
You can go to a workspace by clicking on the project title. The activity feed tab provides a listing of all the posts across all of your projects, so you can use this to know the recent activity across all your work.
There is also a feature known as Project tracker. This enables you to add or manage tasks and deliverables required to complete your project. For each of these, assignments can be made, dates can be set and status can be tracked.
You can also add key dates and milestones which act as a deadline for tasks to be completed.
Recently Released Trusted Networks
Working with a mavenlink network provides organizations a single place to manage their internal and external communication. To create a network in Mavenlink, sign in to your Mavenlink dashboard and click “Create a Network” from the status bar.
Then provide a name and headline for your network along with a meaningful description. Then hit Create and your network is ready.
The public facing site provides visibility to visitors, partners and potential clients. It also provides anyone to quickly engage with your network. You are able to customize your network’s brand identity and more importantly, visitors are able to quickly see who is in your network and the strength of the team.
If they have immediate needs they can quickly contact the network director and begin a conversation. If any visitor is interested to learn more about your team, he can click through to the “Our members” tab. This tab provides vital information about individual network members.
The contact us tab provides a very simple interface for the client engagement process. Visitors are brought to a contact page with your unique messaging. They can learn more about your network or go to a project workspace.
Mavenlinks network technology also allow its members to interact freely in a private collaborative space, viewable to only network members.
The team can share information to the group or message individual tem members about client opportunities. Network administrators can notify the wholle network group about upcoming events, key dates and important announcements.
Other Useful Features of Mavenlink
Google Integrations: Google Apps users can take advantage of Mavenlink�s recent integrations to Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google Calendar. Dates within Mavenlink sync to your Google Calendar. You can embed collaborative Google Docs within any workspace and define permissions for other workspace participants to view or edit (without separate email invitations). And all of your Google contacts are available to use within the Mavenlink system
Manage Online payments: You can easily request Paypal payments right from your Mavenlink dashboard and keep a log of payments. This is useful because you can officially document which of the team members have received payments.
Set Permissions: Not all members of your team have the same skills, thus you can assign specific capabilities to selected members. For example: John may have the permission to read all the posts about a project but he may not have permission to download the files or reply to any post or message.
Create Schedules and Budgets: You can create a timetable for each of your projects, this ensures better organization and systematic developement. Deadlines can be set and your team members work under a common calendar. You can also define dollar amount for your projects – this decides how much money you are going to spend on a particular project.
Know the benefits of using Mavenlink for your business and the complete features of the amazing client – consultant project management system.
Also have a look at the Mavenlink community and the blog, you can read what independant professionals are saying about Mavenlink, know the tips and tricks and engage with other active users who are using the Mavenlink platform.
Digital Product Delivery: Selling Products Online Is Not That Hard, As We Assume!
Selling digital products on the Internet can look like an overwhelming and expensive endeavor. However, with the right tools, knowledge, and experience, it is very feasible to make a remarkably viable online marketplace in a matter of a few clicks of the mouse. Significantly helping to streamline and simplify the process for online marketers while still offering a wealth of features and options is DPD.
Standing for Digital Product Delivery, it is a comprehensive e-commerce utility for people who want to sell digital products on the web.
Sell Digital Downloads at a Flat Price
With some of the other online marketplaces that facilitate the sale of digital products, the sellers are hit with transaction fees, hosting fees, and other charges that can quickly bite into the bottom line. Such is not the case with DPD. Instead, subscribers pay a low monthly fee and are offered unlimited downloads and unlimited transactions. In fact, it is possible to sell digital products through a number of different websites, all through one DPD account.
When you use a standard Google Checkout or PayPal process for selling a digital product, you may be hosting your premium content on a freely available webpage. You may use a generic link that is sent out to all buyers, opening up the possibility of link farming, piracy, and other related issues. DPD is different in the way that it works. Each buyer is provided with a unique, secure download link. This way, it is much more difficult for multiple people to download from the same purchase. In the settings area on the user dashboard, you can also set restrictions in the number of download attempts, as well as a time limit for how long the generated download link remains active.
Multiple Websites, Multiple Profiles, Multiple Products
One of the major features offered by DPD is that it can handle multiple websites and multiple products from a single DPD account and interface. This significantly streamlines the process. Each website can be afforded its own profile, defining such items as the store name, website URL, currency accepted, contact name, default language, payment processor, Google merchant ID, tracking HTML, download limits, and more. Since this e-commerce tool hosts all of your digital products too, you don’t have any worries about bandwidth and minimal concerns over downtime. Most DPD plans have no product file size limit, ensuring that you have enough room for larger content like videos and software packages.
Inspecting the User Dashboard
From this dashboard, you have quick access to your stats and analytics, as well as the ability to edit your websites and products.
Each website and each product is listed separately on your inventory page, including links to the different options and customizations available. Each product is given its own unique product ID, as well as a thumbnail image. Going into each individual product, you can also gain access to pre-designed buttons (including the full HTML code for each) that you can then embed on your websites, forums, and other places on the Internet. There are sets compatible with single-item (instant) checkouts and multiple-item (shopping cart) checkouts. After the buyer completes the purchase process, he or she can be redirected to a return URL that you define. This could be a specialized “thank you” page that you design or it could be back to your main website; it’s up to you.
Integration with WordPress Blogs
WordPress continues to be one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet, not only for blogs, but also for content websites and e-commerce stores. As such, DPD has also been designed to be compatible with the platform. In this way, you can “turn your WordPress blog into a download selling marketplace” with DPD. There is no extra code-edited needed on your part. In fact, you don’t even need to copy-and-paste like how you would with a regular website. Instead, the entire transaction can be facilitated with the WordPress plugin. Simply download and activate the plugin, connecting to your DPD account, and you’ll be ready to sell digital products on your WordPress site in no time. This includes a sidebar checkout widget, customizable buttons, and the ability to add cart buttons to your posts.
Run Your Own Affiliate Programs
Want to enlist the help of affiliates to promote your product? As it turns out, DPD comes with it’s own built-in affiliate system to automatically track affiliate’s commissions and generate payout reports. DPD generates your own affiliate “mini-site” to link from your sales site where your affiliates can log in and view their sales stats, generate links, read vendor news, and more. DPD supports multiple payout levels too, so you can set up “super affiliates” with higher payouts. A unique feature of DPD, vendors can create affiliate buy buttons that allow affiliates to sell your products, right from their website while you retain complete control.
Offering Coupons and Discounts
Allowing you to open a regular e-commerce store is already pretty powerful, especially with multi-website and multi-product support, but DPD goes even further.
It is possible to offer discount codes for each of your digital products. These coupons codes are defined by you and you can define the amount of the discount, either as a flat rate or as a percentage of the purchase price. Want to only offer the coupon to the first X number of buyers? You can do that too. The coupon can also be time-limited, giving you all sorts of opportunities for creative marketing and promotion.
Sell Digital Products with Fixed Costs
A remarkably robust and powerful e-commerce tool, DPD is also very affordable, even for the smallest of online merchants. There are a number of pricing plans available, including a 30-day free trial. All plans include PayPal support, Google Checkout support, an affiliate enabled multi-item checkout cart, ClickBank support, and the ability to give free samples. The smallest plan is just $5 a month and includes up to 10 products with a max product size of 50MB. Even at this price, you are afforded unlimited bandwidth and unlimited transactions. The most popular plan is $10 a month, allowing for up to 20 digital products, unlimited product space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited transactions. The 30 product, 60 product, and 120 product plans are $16, $22, and $30 per month, respectively. DPD even has larger plans available for volume sellers!
Handset Detection Optimizes The Mobile Web Experience
One of the fastest growing segments on the Internet today is the mobile web. More and more people are starting to surf through websites and download a myriad of content onto their cell phones, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Unfortunately, much of the Internet has been designed to be best enjoyed on a full-size computer. For designers and developers, there is an additional issue of addressing all kinds of different mobile devices with different levels of compatibility and different screen sizes.
To help address this issue, Handset Detection offers an integrated solution that will direct visitors to the right place depending on their smartphone, cellular phone, or other mobile device of choice.
How Does Handset Detection Work?
Let’s go through a sample scenario. You have an online shop where people can buy a variety of widgets and you want to have a mobile version of the site that is compatible with as many different smartphones as possible. Should someone come to visit your company’s website from an iPhone, you can offer an iPhone-optimized site that has been designed to work best with that screen resolution and with a touchscreen-based interface. This might mean having larger buttons and having links more spaced out. By contrast, if someone were to visit the site from a BlackBerry Curve, you want the site to look best on the smaller, lower-resolution screen. Since the Curve has a trackball or trackpad, the links can be closer together and the buttons don’t have to be as big. How can you automatically redirect your visitors to the appropriate site? That’s where Handset Detection comes into play.
Using this system, a visitor attempts to visit your website. Your server then relays a request to Handset Detection asking about the characteristics of the visitor’s web browser. This request passes through a load balancer so that it can be directed to the most optimal Handset Detection server. From there, the Handset Detection server analyzes the request and sends all available information back to your server, including manufacturer, model name/number, wireless carrier, geolocation, screen resolution, and so on. Your server can then use that information to provide the most optimized user experience. Handset Detection has a device database of over 37,000 mobile devices and device variations with about 200 more mobile devices being added each week.
Providing the Right Products Too
The Handset Detection system can not only be used for the optimization of different mobile websites, but also for the distribution of digital products and other mobile content. For instance, you can offer different cell phone wallpapers, ringtones, and themes based on the handset that is identified. If someone came to the site using a Nokia E72, the desired wallpaper size would be dramatically different than if they visited using a Google Nexus One.
More Features and Highlights
Naturally, the biggest feature of the Handset Detection service is its ability to identify thousands of different mobile devices, redirecting visitors and customers automatically to the appropriate mobile web location. In addition to the handset detection, the service can also determine the location and wireless carrier of these visitors. By using this kind of customized and personalized approach, you can offer deals specific to that customer. Want to target O2 users in London? You can. Want to target T-Mobile customers in California? You can do that too. The Geo IP feature can detect carrier, country, city, region, longitude, and latitude.
The Handset Detection is system is constantly updating and learning, gaining knowledge about over 500,000 browsers, bots, crawlers, cell phones, and game consoles. You can rest assured that Handset Detection runs on redundant Amazon AWS server clusters, virtually eliminating any lag or downtime. These server clusters use AWS S3, auto scaling, load balancing, and cloudwatch.
Building with the API Kits
Detecting the different handsets and mobile devices is useful, but the information cannot be put to use if you don’t have the right content to go with it. Thankfully, Handset Detection offers a wide range of API kits for most of the major development languages. This way, you can quickly and easily optimize your mobile content for a variety of different devices. The API kits are updated on a regular basis and they include kits for PHP, Python, Java, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion. To provide the best experience, Handset Detection also welcomes developers to provide additional kits, additions, and updates to be posted on the site. This makes it much easier for designers to use. For more support, it is worth checking out the resources section on the Handset Detection site. This is a great place to learn about handset information, like screen sizes, click to call strings, and other phone properties. Additional information can be found on the official blog as well.
Analyze All Mobile Web Visitors
One of the critical features included in Handset Detection is the statistical package. You want to know more about your customers and where the greatest opportunities may lie. Most conventional analytics packages use Javascript, but 73% of mobile handsets do not support this standard. You are losing out! Thankfully, Handset Detection Analytics overcomes this issue and works with the majority of mobile devices. The detection and redirection information can be accessed from your user dashboard, letting you learn about percentage of mobile users, top countries, top carriers, most popular phone models, and so on.
Make More Money as an Affiliate
While Handset Detection will certainly help your mobile business make more money by catering to each specific customer on a near individual basis, you can earn additional revenue by signing up as an affiliate. The affiliate program actually consists of two parts. Referrers can earn 25% of any subscriber payments whereas developers can earn 25% of subscriber payments if the subscriber uses their software. If you do both for the same referral, you effectively earn a 50% commission. Payments are issued once a month via PayPal, assuming a minimum balance of $20. You can externally track the referrals using your own software if you prefer as well, but you cannot refer yourself.
How Much Does It Cost?
Handset Detection’s pricing model is scalable to suit the specific needs of your business. Starting small? Take the smallest package? Already have a large enterprise-level operation? Go for a bigger package. The Supporter plan is just $5 a month and it includes up to 30,000 detections, comes with full API access, and stores twelve months of history to go with your mobile analytics. Other plans include the $18 Blogger, $47 Professional, $97 Business, and $147 Enterprise. The Professional plan is the most popular with 450,000 monthly detections, soft limits, unlimited history, 3 server license, and live updates. Considering the rising popularity of mobile web access and cell phone digital content, Handset Detection sounds like a great fit to accommodate as many different devices as possible. After all, not everyone uses an iPhone.
Take Your Blog To The Top Of Search Results With SEO PowerSuite
You may have the greatest blog ever with mind-blowing design and captivating content, but if you just sit and wait for people to come and read it, chances are they won’t. In today’s world you need to get out there and promote your blog to get more eyeballs on your writing. One of the best ways to do it is by optimizing your blog for the search engines.
If you take a look at the traffic sources of the top blogs in any niche you’ll notice that a large chunk of their visitors come via search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the most effective promotion tools in the blogger’s arsenal. But when you blog regularly, reply to comments, and work hard to grow a community around your blog you may not have enough time to invest in SEO, and professional SEOs charge an arm and a leg. So how do you optimize your blog without stealing the time from blogging or forking out for SEO services?
That’s where SEO software like SEO PowerSuite comes to the rescue. SEO PowerSuite is a premium package of SEO tools that help you optimize your blog and win top rankings on major search engines while spending as little as 30 minutes a day on SEO.
SEO PowerSuite is made up of 4 powerful SEO tools that take care of every aspect of effective website promotion:
Rank Tracker – a search engine rankings checker and keyword research tool.
SEO SpyGlass – backlink checker and competition analysis tool.
WebSite Auditor – content optimization tool.
LinkAssistant – link building and link management script.
Let’s take a closer look at each script in the pack and see how it can help you push your blog to the top of search engine listings.
Rank Tracker
Rank Tracker is a fast and accurate rank checker that lets you monitor where your blog ranks for your chosen keywords in all the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, AltaVista, etc. The software supports over 600 local and regional search engines so you can track your blog’s rankings all around the world.
Using Rank Tracker is quite simple and straightforward. Start the program, enter the URL of the site you want to track and choose the search engines where you want to track the performance of your desired keywords. Next, enter the keywords and Rank Tracker will show you a detailed report on the positions and ranks.
Rank Tracker shows you all the critical information on your rankings:
- Your blog’s position in the search results for each keyword;
- The URL of the page found in the search results;
- How many positions up or down you are since the last check;
- And how you rankings evolve over time.
The tool draws a ranking graph of your blog’s rank changes to visualize your progress and generates customizable ranking reports with all the data on your keywords and rankings. You can schedule ranking checks (and other tasks) to be run on autopilot and Rank Tracker will monitor your blogs positions automatically.
Keyword research
Besides checking your rankings Rank Tracker also helps you discover new profitable keywords to target. There are 16 different keyword research methods in Rank Tracker that you can use to locate popular search strings in your niche.
You simply enter a number of seed keywords and Rank Tracker will find related terms. The tool will calculate the Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI) that shows you how popular and competitive each term is.
You can instantly check how many people search for each keyword monthly and how many sites compete for a place in the search results. This way you can find the best keyword opportunities.
WebSite Auditor
WebSite Auditor helps you optimize your content for the search engines to ensure that your posts rank high for the right keywords. The process couldn’t be easier. You simply enter the URL of your webpage and the keyword(s) you want it to rank for. WebSite Auditor will then analyze your content and lay out a step-by-step optimization blueprint. The tool goes through each page element and tells you how well it’s optimized and what you can do to improve it.
WebSite Auditor will help you determine the optimal keyword density for your posts, optimize each page element and even compare your content against the best ranked websites for your keywords. The tool generates a special competition analysis report where it analyzes the content on the 10 top ranked pages for your keywords and helps you take advantage of the best working onpage optimization techniques.
How many times should you use your keywords in the title and in the post? How long should your title be? Where should you put your most important keywords? WebSite Auditor will help you answer these questions and make sure all your posts are 100% search engine friendly.
SEO SpyGlass
Getting links to your blog is the most important and perhaps the hardest part of the SEO job. You can’t rank well for competitive terms without quality incoming links pointing at your site. SEO SpyGlass will help you locate the most powerful link sources in your niche and take advantage of them.
SEO SpyGlass is an advanced backlink checker that lets you analyze incoming links to any website or web page. With it you can check who’s linking to your blog and more importantly – where other blogs and websites get their links. You simply enter the URL of a competing website and get to know all about their incoming links:
- What websites link to the page;
- The URL and title of the linking page;
- Whether the link is still on the page;
- If the link is dofollow or nofollow
- The exact anchor text;
- The Google PageRank of the linking domain and webpage;
- The SEO value passed by every link;
- Which links are coming from blogs, forums, directories and home pages;
- And tons of other critical SEO factors.
With this data link building becomes a much easier task. When you know where to get links you don’t need to spend hours of your valuable time hunting down link sources.
LinkAssistant
LinkAssistant is a link building software that will help you establish and maintain quality links from relevant websites and blogs. Link building is a tedious process that eats up a lot of time yet can’t be avoided because if you want to rank well you need to grow your link popularity.
LinkAssistant lets you automate most time-consuming link building tasks helping you:
- Find quality link partners and dig for contact info;
- Analyze partner sites from the SEO perspective (PageRank, domain age, link popularity, etc.)
- Generate customized link directory that matches your websites design;
- Quickly get in touch with prospective link partners in personalized emails and manage all your link related mail;
- Build reciprocal, 1-way, 3-way and 4- way links,
- Check that all your partners are linking dofollow way with the right anchor texts
- Monitor your link popularity over time, and much more
Conclusion
Looking at SEO PowerSuite, I must say that it’s a must use toolkit for anyone who is serious about optimizing his website for search engines. You get all the information at your fingertips and need not hire any SEO specialist to do the job. Download the Free Edition of SEO PowerSuite and check it yourself.
Pricing:
The Free version of SEO PowerSuite has some minor limitations – you cannot schedule tasks, import or export data or save the reports. There are two paid editions available – Professional and Enterprise and they cost around $249 and $599 respectively. For further details, please check Features & Editions page.
If you do not want to buy the entire package, you can try each individual script at $99.75 for the Professional edition and $249.75 for the Enterprise edition.
Techi.com – Fresh & Never Boring Tech Updates
With so many blogs around in the blogosphere, it becomes really difficult to get the right taste of news you want to read daily. If you love reading about computers, technology and geek stuff, you will find a lot of blogs which claim to serve interesting content and provide the information you are looking for.
Let’s face it – not all blogs are fun to read because they focus on “what brings business” and not on what the reader actually wants to read. Techi.com is a technology blog, but with a different genre – you will love reading the posts without getting bored.
What Techi.com is all about
Techi.com is a blog that serves fresh technology news, funky new design stuff, in-depth editorial articles, and reviews. Not the kind of stuff that makes it to the newspapers, but just the kind of stuff that millions of people love to read every day. It started as a technology blog where you will now find everything – from gadgets to software reviews, from designing tips to Technology news, from Google to gaming and so on.
The interesting thing about Techi is that the writers are not corporate sell outs, they don’t write about the usual boring stuff to attract business and prospects. Rather they focus on building a community around their blog by making the content interesting. The posts are written in a very friendly tone and they don’t appear sarcastic any way.
The Interface of Techi
Techi has a very clean and clear interface; you won’t find junk stuff lying here and there in the design. The fonts are bigger, the colours make it easy to read and they have a very sober layout. If you are a regular reader of Techi, you are already aware of the site’s look and feel, if this is the first time you are going to visit Techi – you will see something like the following:
The home page of Techi.com contains the latest posts published in reverse chronological order, the latest post being displayed at the top. You can use the paginated buttons to dig deeper and see the archive for posts written on an earlier date.
The Topics Covered
Techi.com mainly focuses on technology news and editorials, the main topics include the following:
- Apple
- Design
- Gadgets
- Gaming
- Hardware
- Lifestyle
- Microsoft
- Mobile
- Robotics
- Software
- Technology
I like the idea of lesser categories because the lesser the categories are, the more focussed is the content. You don’t see random posts coming out every now and then, they have a balanced posting frequency and you can expect the latest tech news arriving with the morning coffee in your hand. Here is how the category section looks:
The widget is actually very interesting, you click a topic icon and can see what are the latest posts on that topic. The widget slides the categories panel to the left and shows the latest posts from the selected category, without reloading the page. Neat!
Lesser categories don’t mean they leave the important ones – you will find gadget reviews, news about Apple, what’s happening on Facebook and so on. The site also includes mobile reviews so you can check the mobile reviews section before deciding to buy the latest handset.
You can also use the scrolling tag cloud to dig deeper into a particular topic. Tags help you to find content easily, and the tag cloud implemented in their site is absolutely brilliant. It works simple – you hover the mouse over an alphabet and the corresponding tags are shown, pick a tag, click it and read the posts.
Besides the tags and categories, you can also read the editorial topics here or try some videos in the Techi.com video section. They also offer a separate RSS feed for the video podcasts here, hence it’s easy to see all the videos and screencasts at one place.
The Most Popular Posts at Techi
Techi has a “Popular posts” section included in the sidebar, which looks like the following
The section includes a list of posts that are currently popular among the site’s readers and visitors; you can click the link to read an article. Some of the currently popular articles which are worth a read include Unboxing the iPad 3G, Some Fascinating Twitter stats and Expo 2010 Shanghai report.
Besides the popular posts, if you want to have a sneak peek at the current trends and read some cool stuff, head over to the home page and have a look at the “Cool Tech“ Section. The “Cool Tech” Section looks like the following and includes productivity tips on geekery and lifehacking.
Audience Profile
Although the site has a global audience, the maximum visitors come from United States, Canada, United Kingdom and other European countries. This includes Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. The site is also a trusted source of news in Middle Eastern countries and Asian sub continent because visitors from India, China and Saudi Arabia like to read the published reviews and blog posts.
Here are the Alexa traffic details for techi.com:
Subscription options
If you want to read the content of Techi.com on a daily basis, I suggest you to subscribe to the site. Basic subscriptions options are available which includes – subscribing to the RSS feed so that you can read the blog posts in an RSS reader like Bloglines, Google reader , News gator. But if you prefer to read the articles in your email inbox, you can opt in for the email newsletter instead.
Connect with Techi.com on Social Sites
Techi.com have an active social media presence and you can follow the site’s Facebook fan page. Make sure you also follow Techi on Twitter and Google buzz to get the latest updates as they happen.
Advertising Options
If you are an Advertiser and want to advertise about your product in Techi.com, just send an email at advertising@techi.com. The site is read by bloggers, geeks, tech enthusiasts and has a very targeted audience. Techi.com has a couple of advertising spots available and you will always get a good return of your investment.
Mind Mapping-The Fun Side Of Time Management
Do you want to get better results, be more productive, accomplish your goals and be more organized? It’s all about timing… Time management is planning activities effectively.
Mind maps are an excellent tool for managing time and help you use it efficiently in each step of every process. Mind mapping is a powerful method for generating and picturing ideas and activities, brainstorming and organizing thoughts. Using this type of software can help you save time, increase you skills while you are solving a problem, intensify creativity and facilitate your thinking processes.
Seavus DropMind™ is a mind mapping tool for personal development which will help you be more productive at the workplace and in your life. It arranges your thoughts graphically and makes a clear picture of your activities with a variety of colors and relationships, highlighters, images and icons that will – - help you get clarity of thoughts. Seeing your ideas in colors can increase your problem solving skills, leading to more innovative solutions.
Represented by the desktop platform-friendly mind mapping solution and unique online application created with the next generation, most powerful runtime on the web, MS® Silverlight™, Seavus DropMind™ provides its users with full advantage of the logical way of thinking.
Both applications are integrated and synchronized together by merging the best from the desktop and web solution. This allows you to get the latest changes and be updated anytime and anyplace, without losing any information.
Seavus DropMind™ offers a selection of great features and benefits that enhance brainstorming and strategic thinking, accelerate project and process planning and boost productivity.
Organize yourself
Benjamin Franklin said “For Every Minute Spent Organizing, An Hour Is Earned”
With Seavus DropMind™ you have endless possibilities. You will be able to reduce wastage of time and accomplish more. You can organize your project, add and update task information directly within the mind map by using the advanced task management functionality.
Moreover, Seavus DropMind™ offers powerful presentation mode, which gives possibility to create, export and view mind maps presentations directly within the application. This is useful for seminars and meetings where you can take notes of others thoughts, or simply visually exchange your ideas with others. Viewing different parts of the mind map without distraction offers presenting facts and important data in stylish and interactive way. With the smooth, “click-to” presentation mode you can export slides from the presentation created in the desktop application to MS® PowerPoint or export slides from the presentation created in web application as images in .zip file for further usage.
Mind Mapping in management
If you are a Project Manager you can use Seavus DropMind™ at the beginning phase of a project. It’s an excellent way for defining goals and objectives especially if you have a lot of responsibilities. With Seavus DropMind™ your team can better understand the project and contribute to the planning in a visual and well organized way. With the powerful integration options Seavus DropMind™ can save managers a valuable time by organizing the daily work load and turning ideas into decision making process.
The integration between the desktop application, MS® Project and MS® Outlook as well as the integration of the web application with Basecamp, Google Docs and Google Contacts provides a complete solution for managing projects, tasks and resources. Together with the seamless integration between the desktop and web solution, it provides complete overview for all project activities: from collaborative brainstorming, discussions, task delegation and importing entire projects, up to completing the project planning. Moreover, the whole map content can be exported to MS® Word in a very intuitive visual format, which gives complete overview of the inserted topics and all other visual elements created in Seavus DropMind™. The export to MS® Word makes the created document very useful handout for meetings, reports, contracts or summaries.
The MS® Project integration offers complete overview of the project in visually distinctive way. Importing .mpp files in Seavus DropMind™ – Desktop, allows information to be shown as task info in every topic.
With MS® Outlook integration it is possible to exchange and synchronize task information between MS® Outlook and Seavus DropMind™ – Desktop, without losing any important data or notification.
The Basecamp integration offers possibility of exchanging project data and task information between Seavus DropMind™ – Web and Basecamp – importing to-do lists or to-do items from Basecamp and exporting topics’ name as tasks’ name to Basecamp.
The Google integration offers a well-built solution for complete control over your documents at hand, by uploading and attaching your Google Docs to any topic within mind maps. Moreover, you can import Google Contacts in the mind map community and make advanced search through the content of their Google Docs. This integration allows you to always get the latest changes and manage attachments and contacts from both sources, Seavus DropMind™ on one side and Google Docs and Google Contacts, on the other side.
Powerful Collaboration
You can use Seavus DropMind™ – Web to better communicate with your team and give more valuable ideas during brainstorming sessions. Mind maps are visually oriented and that gives possibility of better viewing, gathering, managing and sharing information.
The web application offers unique collaboration and chatting in real time with friends and colleagues, working on the same map and making changes at the same time. Each action during the collaboration is recorded. It is possible to see how the map was built using the timeline slider of changes, which empowers the education process and facilitates the business uses of the application itself. Having the simultaneous collaboration available, the overall communication process is improved and a wide range of time is saved for further actions.
Seavus DropMind™ – Web offers vast interactivity while working on mind maps. Everyone can share their mind maps with others, by assigning friends and colleagues as collaborators or viewers, as well as to publish their maps and make them accessible to all Seavus DropMind™ users. By selecting a single topic, it gives possibility to search words or phrases written in the selected topic and find related information online, via Google, Delicious, Live Search and Wikipedia. With the Twitter integration you can receive map alerts as direct messages on your Twitter account or tweet the selected topic’s content, simply by allowing twittering from each map separately and following Seavus DropMind™ on Twitter.
The benefits of mind mapping are endless. Seavus DropMind™ merges the best from the mind mapping core functionalities and offers advanced features that help you identify and better understand the problem and opportunities. By identifying the issue, you can define alternatives and goals and start making decisions. You can analyze a complex problem by breaking it down, write down your ideas and come up with solutions. You can easily gather and share a huge number of ideas and information, because their visual quality provides an opportunity for much easier managing, understand better relations between them and save time.
Get better results by doing less work!
Be more productive, accomplish your goals and be more organized!
iSyndica:Upload Photos to Multiple Stock Photography Sites from One place
Stock photography and videography has become a decent profession in recent years and many talented photographers earn online by selling their work. Clicking photos and videos is fun and interesting, but to sell them is not an easy job. You must have a portfolio and a solid social media presence so that people know that you exist. They can see your work and eventually, interested visitors will turn into future prospects or clients.
Why Photographers Need Stock Photography sites and Online Agencies?
The first and simplest reason is exposure. It’s far better to use Flickr rather than a blogspot blog to showcase your work. If you portray your work at the right place, you will reap more returns and value because your work will be viewed by more visitors.
The second and most important reason is security. There are hundreds of thousands of copycats out there who will steal your work if you lay it open on Flickr or any other social media website like Facebook, Twitter etc. Consider a situation when a photographer uploads his work on Flickr and someone just downloads and sells it to any other company or at ebay. The photographer would not be able to know when his work is sold illegally. And if he happens to track that person who stoled his work, will he have any proof that the photograph originally belongs to him?
This is where stock photography sites come into play. You submit your photographs in various stock photography sites and display your work to a large number of people. Their is no issue of content theft as your photographs are watermarked with your brand and registered under your name. If someone is intrested, he may choose to buy your work or contact you directly.
About iSyndica
iSyndica is a cloud based media distribution company which helps users to promote, syndicate and track their content on multiple established channels. This includes 25 most popular stock photography sites, 7 video agencies and 10 stock illustration agencies.
Here is what the company has to say about themselves:
“iSyndica eliminates the need for you to upload your files to several sites. You upload with us, we store it, we distribute it and we provide you with statistics. All in one place!”
The service is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the virtual distribution server (VDS) is awaiting patent approval.
How it Works?
iSyndica helps you simplify the process of submitting the photographs to multiple stock photography sites, all from one place. You can create your portfolio and then distribute it on multiple photo sharing sites, without losing credits of your work. As soon as your image is uploaded, your image is sent to all the stock agencies in a couple of minutes. Next, go to these sites one by one, pick the desired categories and hit submit.
This is useful because you don’t have to open all the sites and submit your work one by one, which becomes unmanageable after some time. In addition to distributing the content, iSyndica provides you with important statistics.
Uploading Photos: The site supports only the JPEG format for uploading photos. The maximum file size is 25 MB per image and the minimum image size is 4 Megapixel.
Managing Your Catalog of Photos: The Catalog is where you get to manage your images, change the metadata information and also syndicate them to custom channels. Basically, there are two types of channels -sales and promotional.
The sales channel offers an interface to sell your items. The “Syndicate”
function allows you to mark your items accepted or rejected by the stock agencies.
Promotional channels are used mostly on social sharing platforms, where you can put your items to show them to a different public. You can use the “Promote” link from the menu bar and watermark the images before sharing them on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and the like.
Using Channels to Track performance: You can use custom channels within your iSyndica dashboard to track the performance of your work in different sites. A “channel” is simply one of the places you distribute your content to, for the purpose of sharing and/or selling it. To add or configure a channel, click “Configure Channel” icon on the Channel list. Next, supply the login details of the site where you want to submit your work. iSyndicate will validate and store the login credentials for future use and once you upload a photo, the site will use this information to submit your photos to the specified site.
Analysis: The Tracking and analysis section, looks very impressive and you can can see the performance of your work in different stock photography sites. This includes charts and bar graphs which shows your projected earnings, number of downloads, revenue etc.
In the premium plans, new data is updated up to 12 times a day. The free plan offers twice daily updates up to the end of your subscription trail date. All he sales are shown in USD which is based on daily currency rates. The charts considers some important factors like day of the week and compares it with overall trends so you get precise data.
Integrate additional services on top of the stored contents using iSyndica AP:
Using the iSyndica API, you can create great applications on top of iSyndica’s Virtual Distribution Server. The API is free to use and works on Oauth so you can use the application to promote your work and your brand on social media and sites that support Oauth authentication. The API allows you to perform a wide range of functions- from uploading photos, applying distribution rules, collecting reports, modifying product metadata etc. More information can be found here.
Affiliate Program: After registration, you are automatically enrolled in the iSyndicate affiliate program. Your affiliate link is http://vds.isyndica.com/affiliate/<username>
Supported Sites and Agencies
Currently iSyndica supports photos, videos and illustrations. Following is a list of all stock photography sites which the service supports:
Stock photo agencies:
- 123RF®
- ArcticStockImages®
- Bigstock®
- CanStockPhoto®
- Facebook®
- FeaturePics®
- Flickr®
- Fotolia®
- Shutterstock (using iSyndica’s generic connector)
- Picasa®
- Polylooks™
- TwitPic®
- Catooh®
- ClipDealer®
- Crestock®
- Cutcaster®
- Demotix®
- Dreamstime®
- Graphicleftovers®
- iStockphoto®
- MostPhotos®
- MyStock®
- Photobox®
- Pixmac®
- Rodeo®
- ScanStockPhoto®
- Shutterfly®
- SmugMug®
- Stockfuel®
- Veer®
- Vivozoom®
- YayMicro®
- YFrog®
- Zenfolio®
Supported video agencies:
- CanStockPhoto®
- Facebook®
- Flickr®
- Fotolia®
- AlwaysHD®
- BlipTV®
- Catooh®
- ClipDealer®
- Pond5®
- RevoStock®
- Stockfuel®
- Twitvid®
- Viddler®
- YFrog®
- YouTube®
- Shutterstock (using iSyndica’s generic connector)
- istockphoto (using iSyndica’s generic connector)
Supported stock illustration agencies:
- 123RF®
- Bigstock®
- CanStockPhoto®
- Facebook®
- FeaturePics®
- Flickr®
- Fotolia®
- Picasa®
- Polylooks™
- TwitPic®
- ClipDealer®
- Crestock®
- Cutcaster®
- Dreamstime®
- Graphicleftovers®
- Photobox®
- Pixmac®
- Stockfuel®
- Veer®
- Vivozoom®
- YayMicro®
- YFrog®
Supported stock audio agencies:
- AudioSparx
- AudioMicro
- Catooh
- ClipDealer
- Pond5
- RevoStock
- Stockfuel
In addition to the above sites, iSyndica supports upto 20 customized generic FTP channels. You can transfer your items to any FTP server of your choice.
Pricing and Plans
Subscription Levels and Credits:
There are different subscription levels which depends on how many uploads you do in a specified period of time. You can try the service using the free subscription option, which lets you upload 200 credits per month. 1 credit equals to 1 website where your content is submitted. So if you upload only one image and submit it to 10 different stock photography sites, it will cost you 10 credits in total.
Here are all the available plans to choose from:
The premium plan is affordable and costs only 79$ a year. You get 20 GB of storage space and customizable promotion on social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc. If the premium plan looks too costly, try the standard plan for only 19$ a year. This includes all the features of the premium plan except the customized social media promotion and secure FTP uploads.
If you don’t want to start with a paid plan right now, you can always try the free trial for 15 days. Here are all the features which you get in the free trial period:
- 2 GB secure data storage
- secure backups and export functions
- daily sales and revenue reporting
- custom FTP settings
- 200 free credits
- social network promotion
Overall, the site looks very good and provides service of high value. If you want a simple interface to submit your work to multiple stock photography sites, iSyndica is a great option.
Try it yourself today: iSyndica Signup
