After the Deadline – I wish I’d found this ages ago.  If you do a lot of writing on the web, this is the best contextual spell-checker and grammar fixer.

Apple TV – anyone that knows me knows that I’m pretty passionate about this device, even if Apple isn’t.

Basecamp – at work, this is where we keep track of all of our projects (milestones, messages, to do lists)

Dreamweaver – I’m not a big fan of Adobe, but I use this HTML editor every day (especially helpful for table layouts in HTML emails)

Fireworks – this goes with Dreamweaver; still my favorite “quick and dirty” image editor (both bitmaps and vectors)

Freshbooks – in my side business, this is how I stay organized with sending invoices and getting paid

Google Apps – I use Google for email and calendars, mostly.  Great email service.

Highrise – used to track contacts, conversations, and tasks related to contacts

iPhone 3G – most important device I carry

Screenflow - a really great Mac app that allows you to create screencasts, and video tutorials

Seismic Desktop – My favorite desktop app for Twitter and Facebook (largely because it supports multiple accounts)

Skitch – I use this about 10x a day.  The best screen capturing app for a Mac.

TextExpander – I probably use this 25x a day.  Expands a shortcode to a specific piece of text (ie. “AAmailing” becomes the full mailing address).

Twitter – I’m still a big fan.  Micro conversations, completely searchable, makes it easy to share content.

WordPress – last on the list, but probably first in terms of importance, is the WordPress platform. I use it personally every day and also use it as a CMS for people that buy a website from me.

Here is the video:

The really neat thing about this blog, is how I’ve set it up: everything is automatic. When a blogger on the site publishes a story, a link to that story is automatically sent to Twitter and Facebook.  And at midnight, all of the day’s stories are automatically compiled into an email and sent to the mailing list.  No button pushing necessary.

For this project I also did a lot of work optimizing the site for search engines (like Google), and customizing the theme itself.

The online campaign went very well, and created tremendous buzz for their opening week:

• “I first heard of them when they signed up on Twitter (@duchessbakeshop), and immediately wanted to check the shop out.” – Britney Leblanc, iNews880
• “Word about Duchess spread like wildfire on the Internet – kudos to their marketing folks for harnessing the power of social media.” – Sue Robins
• “Everyone’s raving about Edmonton’s newest culinary offering: Duchess Bake Shop” – Twyla Campbell

Derek Sivers has a great story on his blog about a musician who booked an ad in a magazine in the hopes of converting 1% of the magazine’s readership into sales.  In this case, 1% would have translated into 10,000 CDs sold.  The result?  4 CDs sold.

He ends with this line: “He forgot there was a number lower than one percent.”

This story reminded me of when I owned my own retail shop.  We would place a full-page ad in the newspaper (with a coupon), hoping sales would just poor in.  The newspaper’s circulation was 20,000, so a 1% conversion would have meant 200 new customers.  But sure enough, only a handful of new people would walk through the door.

Circulation means nothing without engagement. This is one of the reasons the newspaper industry is in such trouble; for years businesses would throw money at advertising and hope it would make a difference.  The problem is that, often, it didn’t.

This isn’t to say that print doesn’t have a place; there are many factors to consider, including the size of one’s target market, ad design, etc…  The difference is that online you can measure engagement:

• with a well built web site you can track visitors, and what they’re reading when they are on your site
• a social marketing campaign can be measured for success based on blog posts on other sites, comments, tweets, etc.
• an email newsletter can provide you with stats based on interests and click-through.

My recommendation for businesses with yearly marketing budgets of $500-$5,000 is to spend the majority of that money building engagement online.  When you compare it with print advertising, you will get a much better return on investment.