Paperless Post: Classy emails for thank yous and invitations
In the year 2000, people sent about 12 million daily emails. In 2010, the number of emails per day is 247 billion — an increase of about 20,000%! If you want your email to be noticed in all that mess, you have to do something different.
Give Paperless Post a try. Sign up for an account and you get 25 free “stamps” that allow you to send a cool, attention-getting email as an invitation, announcement or thank you. Your recipient receives an elegant email with an envelope they click to open. The invitations themselves are fun to open, and they have tons of templates and realistic-looking textured papers that look as handsome as something you get in the mail.
Paperless Post is not free, and there are several things about the system and the pricing that have made me hesitate to recommend it for business use. First, it’s a clumsy way to manage contacts and responses. Second, all their little extras (like envelope liners and your logo) can really add up. But I just had a great response when I sent a promotion about my speaking services to my professional association contacts, so I thought I’d share.
Watch this quick video to see how it works:
Online Invitations, Stationery, Announcements, and Save the Dates by Paperless Post
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Xpenser: Text, call or email your expenses into an organizer
I spent the last week on a writing retreat as I finished up the book on free and low-cost tools (coming this fall!). While I was writing away, I ran across this favorite of mine, and I realized I hadn’t shared it yet. Xpenser lets you text, call or email in your expenses while you’re on the road.
When you set up your account, you can set up the ways you want to be able to submit expenses. I can send them in via Jott, Twitter, email and more. You just send something like “Taxi 30 to airport” or something, and your expenses will be entered into your online account. Then you can download them in a number of formats to complete your expense reports. You can also take pictures of your receipts and email them to your Xpenser account for safe keeping.
This service is in beta, which means it’s still free. It won’t be for long.
Xpenser – Mobile Expense Tracking and Management.
PDFescape: The PDF editor I’ve been dreaming of!
Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.
But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.
This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.
