In the meantime, enjoy the webinar recording. I covered five great (and free!) graphics tools: Picnik, GIMP, FotoFlexer, Aviary and SignGenerator.org.

The goal of these webinars is to cover a handful of tools in 30 minutes or less. Next month’s topic coming soon!

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

.

Next week I’m doing a presentation on the best free and low-cost online tools to help run a small-staff office. It’s part of a multi-day series of webinars called the 24/7 Small-Staff Association Online Conference for American Society of Association Executives.

My session is Wednesday, July 14 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EST. I’ll be presenting for an hour, then we’ll open the phone lines for an energetic discussion of favorite tools.

Here’s a brief description of the session:

Free and Low-Cost Tools You Can’t Live Without
Join us for an entertaining, lightning-fast tour of tools, gadgets and services you never thought you could afford!

Identify your fave five during the session, and leave with the full list to share with your colleagues. As a closet
computer geek and veteran cheapskate, Speaker Beth Ziesenis of Avenue Z Writing Solutions has been
collecting resources for many years, and her presentation will open your eyes to new ideas and thrifty time
savers.

Registration is still open! Check out the full series here….

(PS — Want to share the free tools presentation with your group? Contact me for availability or read more about Speaking Services here!)

I love these types of environmentally beneficial services (I consider it a Beth Favorite). Signing up with My Junk Tree should put an end to quite a bit of the paper junk mail that fills up your mailbox.

It’s twenty bucks for three years, and they promise to cut down on junk mail and even stop delivery of the phone books that collect dust under the coffee table. Who uses those anymore anyway?

My Junk Tree.

Have you seen these two other green resources?

Come on… be honest. Some of you still text and drive, right? Jott.com is the solution. Just dial a number on your phone, and a chipper voice asks, “Who do you want to Jott?” Say the name of a contact (or yourself), and Jott will take your message and convert it to text, plus attach the audio for the recipient’s listening pleasure. One of the attendees to my presentation called it “automated nagging.”

Jott has been one of my Beth Favorites for a couple of years now. It used to be free, which was crazy, and now they charge a very reasonable $3.95 a month for their most basic service. Well worth it. It integrates with all kinds of things — social media, great to-do list services, etc. Love it.

Jott.com | Voice-to-Text Notes, To Dos & Reminders.

Monday I’m speaking for the Western Association of Chamber Executives, and during our webinar dress rehearsal, the coordinators told me about Poll Everywhere.

Poll Everywhere is a free/low-cost replacement for the very expensive audience polling devices. Instead of handing out devices that connect to a man behind the curtain who creates a chart of results for the audience to see, a speaker can ask the audience to text their choice of responses from a poll he’s displaying, and the results are instantly communicated to a dynamic PowerPoint slide he can show. The system integrates with Twitter, and people can vote from the web as well.

It’s free for up to 30 responses, and darn cheap after that. Plus there’s no long-term commitment, so you can go to the highest level for a one-time event then go back to a free account.

Text Message (SMS) Polls and Voting, Audience Response System | Poll Everywhere.

*** Click here for more tools about surveys…

I’m in Orlando this week, teaching a series of sessions on Free and Low-Cost Social Media Tools. Ordinarily I remote in to my computer at the office using Live Mesh from Microsoft, but the software is misbehaving.

So I returned to an old standby, LogMeIn. I abandoned LogMeIn because it didn’t have all the cool features that Live Mesh does, most notably that I can store the files I need on the road in Live Mesh folders, so when I update them on either computer, all copies of the files are updated. Plus, Live Mesh lets you drag and drop files across the computers, and LogMeIn makes you upgrade to the Pro version for that.

But I just tried LogMeIn again, and I am impressed. I can’t do the file sharing, but now LogMeIn allows me to copy something on one computer and paste it to the other, so I can copy a whole file to transfer. Plus, I use multiple monitors on my desktop, and LogMeIn lets me switch between them with the click of a button.

The biggest thing I like about it today is that it works, and, of course, it’s free. The professional version is quite reasonably priced as well ($70 a year for one computer), plus they have other services such as backup.

LogMeIn – Remote Access and Desktop Control Software for Your Computer.

The cool thing about Elance (besides the very affordable prices you can find) is that you don’t release payment until you’re satisfied, so you can guard against a flighty freelancer.

Elance | Hire experts to do your work: outsource to companies, consultants and freelance professionals..

I first discovered chartbeat when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were competing to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Chartbeat showed the race live, and I was hooked.

For about 10 bucks a month, you can monitor the traffic on up to 5 websites in real time. I mean really real. It shows how many people are visiting, whether they’re new or returning, what pages they are on, how long it took for their pages to load, who is talking about you on Twitter, where they live… everything you might want to know.

On sites with very moderate traffic (like mine thus far), it can be incredibly boring. But when I send out a newsletter or one of my tools goes viral for a few minutes on Twitter, I can monitor the “stickiness” of my site. Do they visit just one page or click around for a few? How long are they hanging out?

As I write this post, a new visitor to my site is checking out my entry about Wordle from a computer on the East Coast. Cool!

You can set up alerts so you get a text when a certain number of people visit your site at once, and the service sends you emails (or texts, your choice) when your site is down (which happens more than you know).

TRY IT! Keep Cheapskate Freelancer open and click here to see yourself on the site.

chartbeat – real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring.

Hey — have you signed up for the newsletter? Quick summaries of the best tools delivered to your inbox!

Get the Newsletter! Email:

No less than three Cheapskate Freelancer readers recommended SurveyMonkey as “worth the money” in the June Giveaway (don’t miss this month’s giveaway — register now!).

SurveyMonkey lets you design surveys easily using more than a dozen question types. I’ve created simple forms for feedback from my clients as well as elaborate surveys with custom skip logic, graphic and customized filters.

The free version gives you 100 responses per survey and up to 15 questions. But, as the Cheapskate Freelancer readers pointed out, for just $19.95 a month you get a whole host of other useful features. Well worth the cost.

SurveyMonkey.com – Powerful tool for creating web surveys. Online survey software made easy!.