I'm Just Sharing

Talking About Magic Jack Plus

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 24, 2012

You know, I just live here, and often I have no idea what’s going on; at least I feel that way. So when my wife came home saying she had a business idea and wanted to use Magic Jack as her business line, I had no idea what she was talking about.

I had to get up to speed so I did some research on it, right around the same time she came home with the thing; talk about timing. What I learned is that it’s what they call a VoIP, or voice over IP, which basically means you’re talking through your computer; why don’t they just say that? lol

At this point I’m betting most of you have heard of this thing, so we’ll dispense with the rest of the nonsense and get right into it. Basically what you do is hook it into your computer via USB and it’ll turn itself on. It will then walk you through a few steps to get you connected and to download the software so that it will work. Once that’s done it’s ready to go.

Of course, we didn’t know that at the time. It has two jacks on it so that you can connect the phone to it or connect your computer to it via ethernet. That made us think that it needed to be connected to the phone in some fashion so we went through all sorts of gesticulations and processes before, by accident, learning it didn’t need any of that stuff at all. As long as you have a free USB you’re good to go. Also, it comes with a short USB cord that you’re probably going to want to use because of the width of the object itself; it will block your other USB port without using the cord.

The thing is, without the phone we weren’t sure how you were supposed to talk on it. I hadn’t thought about pulling the headset from my computer to test it, and instead just called our home number, which you can dial either by using the number pad on your keyboard or clicking on the numbers on the phone pad on your screen with your mouse. It rang the home phone, my wife picked it up and said hello, and I heard her voice coming through the speakers. I said something and she heard my voice on the phone. That freaked us out until we realized that it must have automatically connected voice through her webcam, since she doesn’t have a microphone.

I had her go into the bedroom and close the door so we could test the vocal quality, and it was perfect. Then I had her hold while I went to my computer and pulled the headset. As soon as it connected with her computer a menu came up giving me the option of switching to the headset, which I did, and the sound switched that way and our conversation was still really clear.

One last thing, which is kind of a backup. Before you can make a call, you have to select a phone number. My wife tried some specific numbers that she thought might be memorable but Magic Jack didn’t have any of those available. Then I suggested that she just pick our area code and select from whatever comes up, and in doing that a bunch of numbers came up and she picked one she liked and thought would be easy to remember; I’ve already forgotten it. Since she only wants to use it for voice mail and to call people from it instead of our other numbers (like we don’t have enough phone numbers already) the only concern she had was having a number that looked like it was local. From what I hear if you live in a smaller area you might not be able to get a local area code.

It really was an easy process, and supposedly it will only cost her around $10 a year to renew it. She gets the first year free because she paid $80 for the “plus” version; I can’t tell you what the non-plus version contains. No matter which version you get, you will see advertising on it, but it’s pretty easy to ignore.

For now, unless it cracks up, I have to say it’s a pretty neat thing. By the way, though it says you don’t need to have a computer to use it, you do. We went to Radio Shack to ask some questions and the guy said that what it means is that the computer doesn’t have to be on for it to work, but it needs to be connected to the computer in some fashion, whether by USB or ethernet, to be used. But you don’t have to always have it hooked up if you want incoming calls to go to voice mail; you only need it when you need to use it.

Magic Jack; this one’s lived up to the hype so far.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

5 Things I’ve Learned About My Smartphone

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 10, 2011

As some of you know, I now have a smartphone. Man, do I feel old! Actually, I’m getting younger every day because it seems like every day I learn something new about it and thus I have these daily surprises that aren’t all that depressing.

I know there’s still a lot of people that don’t have smartphones, and it’s just possible that I’ve learned something that people with smartphones don’t know yet. I doubt that second one, but who knows, right? I figured this was fodder enough for a top 5 things post, so here we go:

1. These suckers run through battery power like whales eat krill. Initially it was like we’d charge the things all night and by 5PM we were down to our last bar, whether we’d done almost anything or not. Turns out there are apps for that (man, what commercial is that phrase in?) to help at least a little bit. One is called Open Advanced Task Killer. The other is called Juice Defender. None of them are perfect, but they have helped to a degree.

2. Some apps you just can’t get rid of. There’s a lot of junk on these suckers that comes pre-packaged. Unlike with computers, where you can delete it all, if it came with the phone it’s staying with the phone. Now, one might think that’s not all that problematic; unfortunately it is because…

3. Apps are always running, whether you’re using them or not. And even if you use the ATK I talked about above, it only temporarily shuts down apps. Now, if you downloaded something and turn that off it stays off, but all the other stuff already on there is always running, always consuming some of your battery power. The weasels!

4. You have to get a cushion of some kind to put around your phone. My wife and I got these little rubbery things to put on ours. You’re not necessarily putting it on for protection. You’re putting it on so you don’t accidentally keep clicking on stuff on the top and sides that you just can’t avoid otherwise. The other day I got a phone call from a friend of mine, only she didn’t mean to call me. She’d sent me a text, then set the phone down but accidentally hit the button to call me. My cell recorded about 4 minutes of whatever was going on in her car before it disconnected; I’m just glad she didn’t say anything bad about me. lol

5. It’s wonderful being able to access the internet wherever you are. Wow, how great is this? I can find out where places are, look up things that I can’t fully remember but have on the tip of my tongue, get directions, access websites, etc. I’m on one of those unlimited plans that I hear might be going away, and I hope I get grandfathered in. It’s just the neatest thing; I never thought I’d care but now it seems I do.

That’s all I have; what say you?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Smartphone Madness

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 17, 2011

Last weekend I went with my wife to the local AT&T store to upgrade our phones. Our anniversary is today, but last Sunday was Mother’s Day and there was a special on phones across the board. We went in with no expectations except to exchange the phone that AT&T sent her as a replacement when we had problems with them late last year.

We got lucky as we walked into the store because there was only one person working there and no one else was in the store at the time. The guy spent a lot of time talking to us, and eventually we decided on getting a HTC Inspire 4G, which would be the first “new” phone we’ve ever bought. Every other phone we’ve bought had already been discontinued but had a great price. In this case because of the holiday they were offering the phones at $49.99 each. Sure, we had to go through that long process of setting it all up, but at the end of the day we went home with our first ever smartphones.

The problem? No bars in the house, and very few elsewhere most of the time. For all that AT&T touts themselves to be, over the course of the 11 years we’ve been in this house we’ve rarely had much access to service. With the previous phone I had, the Motorola Razr, at least I rarely had any of my text messages bouncing back. With the new phone, which I thought was supposed to be a major improvement, I couldn’t get a text message to leave the house half the time I tried; same with my wife. But we’ve had people come to the house using Verizon and being able to have total access and use their phones in any way possible.

Over the course of the first week I called AT&T customer service twice. The first time they supposedly sent out a signal booster to both of our phones; nothing happened. The second time the guy said I had to do a full system wipe of my phone, which would cause me to lose everything on it, but that it should work; it didn’t.

If you know nothing else about me know this; I’m kind of a loyal guy. I got my first cell phone in 1995 when the company was called Cellular One. They went through a couple of takeovers until AT&T got them a few years ago, and overall I never thought much about leaving them; it’s just not my style. However, this was the final straw, and it followed my wife not having any bars anywhere she went last Saturday when I was out of town, which left us unable to contact each other.

Last night we went back to the mall knowing we were going to switch from AT&T to Verizon. The picture you see above is the phone I have now. Actually, it’s almost the same phone I had before. This is an odd thing but both phones are from the same company, HTC, and when you look them up on Google they’ll appear as the same thing. But AT&T calls it the Inspire; Verizon calls it the Thunderbolt. And there are a few other changes as well. There was a $200 price difference for each phone, which was kind of irksome, but that’s because the Thunderbolt comes with a 32G SD card; sweet! It also comes with unlimited internet access, whereas the Inspire came with only 2GB; how does one measure how many GBs they’re using online anyway?

The Thunderbolt is slightly smaller, so all the accessories except for the carrying case are too big, and thus we have to get new stuff. The off/on buttons are on opposite sides of each other, as are the volume control buttons. But almost everything else is the exact same. I’m not sure why they do that but so be it. Oh yeah, the Thunderbolt also allows you to take pictures on both sides of the phone; yeah, I won’t be taking many pictures of myself, and y’all probably need to be happy about that.

As far as canceling the deal with AT&T? You get 30 days once you sign a new contract to cancel, and that’s a great thing. And for once, even though it was in the contract, this guy didn’t charge us for the restocking fee, which I think he just forgot about because he didn’t even ask why we wanted to cancel out. If we’d had the same guy we bought the phones from I think it would have been different.

As to the new people? Well, because of all the traffic, strange for a Monday night at this particular mall, we were actually there past closing time, but the two people there showed us a few things we could do with our phone that we hadn’t figured out over the week we’d had them. And some strange anomalies that had occurred previously with the other phones seemed to solve themselves as well.

But the most important thing… we have bars in the house! I don’t have all 4 bars, but I have 2 bars, more than I had most of the time with my other phones over the course of years. I should have done this years ago, but it’s that loyalty thing again. Loyalty needs to be earned from all corners; I need to start holding companies as accountable as I do people.

But I’m happy today, and my wife is happy, and at 14 years together it’s a nice thing.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 27, 2010

I close this week of advertising my products with the one that probably ends up having the stupidest name of all, yet was probably the most fun.

The title of this one, Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes, was also the title of the webinar I did in June 2009 along with Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus! In case you’re wondering about the exclamation point, that’s part of her business name so it has to go there. She’s also going to hate that I used this picture of her. lol

It’s strange how I met Renée. I met her at a sales presentation that this other guy was giving, where I was actually asked to do a 15 minute presentation on leadership. In retrospect it was kind of goofy because it had nothing to do with anything that the guy giving his presentation was talking about, but I got free food and a chance to talk in front of people so I have nothing to complain about. A couple of months later Renée actually called me out of the blue, and for the life of me I can’t remember what we talked about at that time, but we decided to meet. During our conversation she happened to mention that she had paid for a program that allowed her to do webinars, but that she had yet to do one and want to know if I wanted to do one together.

I decided that talking about social media, which is a new direction I wanted to go in, would be somewhat interesting to do. In the course of my putting the outline together, something told me that I needed to talk about the SEO prospects of doing social media, and thus it became a big part of the presentation. If we had ended there, the title might have been kind of cool. But for some reason we added the “90 minutes” part to it, and in my mind that makes it sort of goofy. But the presentation went 84 minutes, including a few questions, and overall it was fun to do. We actually had people who signed up and showed up and participated, and as part of my 2011 goals I’m going to be planning more webinars because they are really neat to do.

At the end of the presentation, Renée indicated that she was going to have her friend put it together as a file so we could look at it to see what we thought. Once we had a chance to review it, after he cleaned it up, I thought it would be a great product for us to sell, and as you can see it’s up there in the second spot at the top left. We actually just made our first sale of that product at the end of October, and it’s pretty neat. We put a great price on that because if you ask me it’s worth a lot more.

Why would I say that? I actually showed a lot of things in that webinar, and I gave real information. The people who participated in the webinar said that they got a lot out of it, and that’s always important for me. I’ve written on this blog before about spending my time listening to things that never told me anything and basically started trying to pitch another product before it ended. Of course those things are always free, and you tend to get what you pay for.

This is it for all the products I have at the present time. Every single one of them has been created as a digital file, so if they’re purchased people just have to download them when they get sent to the URL attached to each product. My book is the only product that you have an option of getting a physical copy of at this point, and one of these years I’m either going to sit down and recorded myself so it can be an audio book or I’m going to pay someone to do it.

I thank all of you for indulging me this past week in promoting my products with a second daily post. These probably won’t get a lot of response, and I may not make any sales out of them, but at least no one can say I didn’t try and that they didn’t know I had products.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 26, 2010

It took me about four years to decide it was time to create another product. This time, it wasn’t going to be about leadership or management, but about websites.

This was my first e-book, Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, and it’s up there in the most prominent sales spot of this blog. The story behind this one starts in November 2006.

I’ve mentioned here and there that I am a member of an organization called the Professional Consultants Association of Central New York; I’m also on the board. What happened is that the Monday before our November meeting that year the president sent out a notice saying that our speaker had canceled at the last minute. He asked all the board members what we should do about the meeting on Friday. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I volunteered to do a presentation on search engine optimization (SEO).

The funny thing is that I was already giving a presentation on Wednesday on hospital charge changes as it relates to coding that was going into effect on January 1st. So I already had one presentation that I’d been rehearsing for, and here I was volunteering for another one; I must’ve been out of my mind. Still, I was up for the challenge.

After the presentation I gave on that Wednesday, I came home and I sat at my desk trying to figure out exactly what I was going to talk about for my presentation on Friday. Late that evening, I came up with an idea that was going to put something together, and I went to bed around 4 AM, woke at 9 AM, and spent the next seven hours putting it together. I thought it was pretty good, and then did a little bit of rehearsing to get the time down, figuring that just because I was doing a last-minute presentation didn’t mean that I had the luxury of walking in and not being prepared. I do consider myself a professional after all.

The next morning I gave my presentation, and let’s just say that it went over very well. It was like I was bringing a whole new concept to these guys, and seeing as how at the time I was probably the youngest person in the room, I can understand that; isn’t that a shame? Anyway, afterwards I ended up having some of the members of the organization asking me if I would do some things with their websites. I thought that was pretty cool, and I realized there was another way I could generate some income. As you know I’m a big proponent of The Secret, where it says that you never know where an opportunity for success will come from, and I figured this might be one of those ways.

At that time I also decided it was time to create a new business website, so I came up with the name SEO Xcellence; actually, all those letters were initially linked together, but for some reason people couldn’t see the one word without seeing the word “sex”, even though I couldn’t see it. So it took me about a year but I finally made the change to what you see above.

A year later I created this blog, and a few months in, with very little traffic and a whole lot of chutzpah, I decided to see if I could do a legitimate product launch. Truthfully, I had no real idea what I was doing, and the truth of the matter is that I didn’t have enough people following me on this blog or Twitter for that matter for it to have had a chance at success. Yet, I still gave it a shot.

I wrote the book, I sent it out to a few people I not only trusted, but figured might learn a couple of things about the topic. I got positive reviews from everyone, and luckily one guy really scrutinized it and saw some typos in it, and once I get those corrected I was ready to go. So I announced that the ebook was coming, and five days later I had the product launch.

In retrospect it was moronic way for me to do it. You don’t do a product launch with only five days notice because there is no way you can build up enough enthusiasm in only five days. Also, you need followers, or at least some kind of big list of people you can send something out to, and I had neither. So on the day of the launch I sold two books, then didn’t sell another book for about a year and a half. Still, I have made some sales, and it’s a product that helps me advertise how I can help small to medium-size businesses with their websites and internet presence.

There’s the story of Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool. It will be interesting to see if the search engines think that the title indicates that this is a duplicate or triplicate post, since I’ve probably had at least two other posts with the same title on them; probably not. I made sure when I wrote this not to make it too complicated, so it’s not overly long. But it is about 56 pages worth of information, and if you’re new to the whole thing I think if you liked how I write explanations on this blog of things you will like that ebook.

And that’s that; one more product to go.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell