How many of you here have been using project management software yourself?  Don’t you think that project management software has become essential for our daily routine so that our entire team can be better aligned in terms of our time coordination with one another?  Basically, a project management software allows us to monitor the tasks that we have completed and hence we can monitor our progress of the multiple projects that we are working on.  Not only is it useful to work as a team, it is also possible to use it as an individual.

Before I continue with my review, let me just put in a basic introduction found in AceProject website:

AceProject is a project management tool that helps organizations get organized using a collaborative approach. Each project can be configured with its own structure, allowing you to manage different types of projects in accordance with your needs. Furthermore, project templates can be defined and reused when creating new projects.

Professionals from various industries have substantially improved their projects efficiency since they chose AceProject. Architects, IT specialists, contractors, software developers and engineers are among our customers.

Now, let’s get started.

I went ahead and signed up a free account with AceProject.  (In fact, I believe the free account might be useful for most of you to get started.  It’s until you are becoming a more powerful user, you will then look into getting the paid version.  But please take note that the free accounts will be deleted automatically after 30 days of inactivity.) 

My first impression

I logged into my personalised account located at http://charleslau.aceproject.com, and see some sample data being entered within already.  As I browsed around the site, I can see how practical AceProject can be when working on a project.  It allows me to manage a lot of aspects related to project management like project cost, expenses, timesheet, task management, documents and more.

AceProject is fast, and it doesn’t feel slow like most of the Web 2.0 products out there which can even be buggy after a few clicks.  You can even customize the look and feel, put your logo and change colors to fit your brand.

Easy access on your mobile device

It is important that a project management software is also accessible on my mobile device.  Most of my time, I am outside of my house.  I need the software which allows me to access on the road.  And it turned out that AceProject has worked out the mobile version.  According to AceProject, the mobile version of AceProject is a new implementation, and it is compatible with all mobile devices and also all desktop browsers like IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

Since I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, I tried accessing the mobile version at http://charleslau.aceproject.com/m/.  You can see how it looks like in the screenshot above.  It looks really neat and clear for all the tasks.  This will be useful for me to manage my web projects with my team as they are all located around the world.

Other features of AceProject

AceProject empowers you to structure projects with the following parameters:

• User Assignment: Several users can be assigned to a project, with specific access rights in each project.
• Task Groups and Types: A project can be divided in phases or modules, for easier management. Task groups or types are useful to categorize tasks, in accordance with your needs.
• Task Statuses: Tasks within a project are likely to go through many statuses, from the beginning until completion. Task statuses can be created in accordance with your needs, using “Waiting”, “In Progress” and “Completed” types.
• Task Priorities: The level of urgency of each task might influence the project’s completion. Task priorities are useful to identify which tasks should be prioritized. A task priority can be “Low”, “Normal”, “Urgent”, etc.
• Project Costs: A financial budget as well as the number of hours required can be defined for each project.
• Marked Projects: Marking a project lets you identify projects that require more attention than others (e.g. urgent, critical or overdue projects).

For more details of using AceProject, please go to PC Advisor on How to set up a project plan using AceProject.

Where else can AceProject be used?

It has become trendy that people are producing software-as-a-service (also known as SaaS) on the Internet.  Same goes for AceProject.  But AceProject went one step ahead by allowing the users to buy the software and host AceProject software themselves in their own intranet.  Here’s the link to find out more about the two AceProject packages.

Depending on your personal needs, I would personally recommend to use SaaS to save all the hassle.  But if you really need the software in your intranet, you will need to set up all the server settings and everything else yourself.  Some may really need to go to that extreme, I think it is better for you to focus on your business while leaving the rest to the experts.

Conclusion

I have used a couple of project management software myself.  I have installed the free ones on my server to use before.  There are a couple of tweakings that need attention on, and they are really taking my time before I can get down into business.  On the other hand, I am embracing the software-as-a-service way of using the software simply because I don’t have to download the software and host it myself.  Everything is ready once I have signed up an account!  And this is a decent business for AceProject since I don’t have to worry about why certain things are not working (if there is), so that I can focus on my business.  I just need to write in to AceProject and they will do the rest.   It is not possible for a hosting company to provide similar support to you if you are hosting the software yourself.  Furthermore, the free version of AceProject has all the features inside and is sufficient enough for you to play for probably at least three months till you need more space for more projects and files.

 Actually, there is nothing to lose… Why not just try a free account and find out for yourself?  (AceProject main website)

Start organizing your projects by signing up for a free account with AceProject now!

Introduction of T3leads.com

T3Leads has been around in the lead marketing industry since 2006.  T3Leads provides a platform for both Affiliates and Merchants.  Affiliates get to drive the highest revenue for their traffic while promoting the strongest offers in the market with the latest in lead optimization technology. Merchants get to receive only the highest quality and are presented with unparallel performance which will truly impact your business sales flow while lowering their advertising costs.

What do the Affiliates get to gain?

Affiliates can be from anywhere in the world.  So long as the affiliates have a website to bring in leads for the T3Leads Merchants, they will get to make money from T3Leads.  Affiliates will be paid for those leads which are bought out successfully, but rejected leads will not be compensated.

Affiliates can also use completely designed and ready-to-use web pages provided by T3Leads. However, the affiliates are encouraged to modify their web pages in order to optimize traffic that they have generated from their marketing strategy.

Once the websites are up properly, all the affiliates need to do is to promote their sites and start earning revenue from the converted leads!  It’s as simple as that.  And if the affiliates can make over $1000 in weekly sales, they can also qualify to be paid on a weekly basis!

What do the Merchants get to gain?

Merchants are provided with a vast inventory of leads which are specifically matched to their marketing needs.  T3Leads’s quality lead generation process ensures lower advertising costs while increasing the merchants’ sales conversion, bring them a level of performance that is unrivaled.

There is no start-up fees or long-term exclusive contracts needed from the merchants.  In fact, there are dedicated account managers to provide full and best practice support to the merchants who wish to make full use of the lead generation system provided by T3Leads.

The merchants will only need to pay T3Leads only when the leads are converted successfully.  You won’t be able to find anywhere else where the merchants don’t have to pay for the kind of exposure that they get when they are not making any money yet!  In other words, the merchants may not need to pay a single cent if they cannot find any sales out of it!

Most importantly, the merchants get to enjoy the large amount of traffic that T3Leads directs to them through their affiliate network.  This will give rise to the brand awareness of the merchants’ companies in the end.

What does T3Leads have to offer for the affiliates to market?

Looking through the lead programs, T3Leads basically focuses on the financial industry where they work on Payday Loans, Auto Loans, Auto Warranties, Loan Modification, Insurance Products, Tax Settlement, Credit Cards, Credit Repair, UK Payday Loans and Home Improvement.  Hence, if you are in the finance industry, you will be able to adopt this affiliate program easily to make additional income by leveraging on their website templates that they have provided for you.

I have not really seen through the actual programs myself, but based on the exposure that it has on the Internet, and that it has been around for a couple of years, it should make sense for anyone who has been marketing in the financial niche to take a good look at the programs if it is suitable for them to consider.

Looking at the amount of money that people need to spend on their daily lives or even on their other investments, it makes sense that anyone of us may want to create websites in the financial niche?  Isn’t it?

Find out about T3Leads affiliate program and start making money in the financial niche!

If you like a page, you are allowing the information to flow into your news feed and thus letting your friends know about a page that you like as and when the page is updated.  But if you like a friend’s link, it will not flow your friend’s information into your news feed.

While I may not even be interpreting the things correctly myself, I am probably be confused myself actually.  But for your benefits, please read this Facebook link to find out what “like” means.

I seriously think that Facebook needs to rethink about using the word “Like” because it only makes people confused.  There’s no real objective of changing it away from “Do you want to be a fan of this page?”  Don’t you think so?

There are many ways we can do to promote our products and services in the web community.  I purposely wrote it as “web community” instead of social media because I want to focus on the websites as a whole, instead of talking about social media particularly.

The whole idea of a website is really about building a community of your own, where people are interested in what you are talking about, and to participate wherever they can.  Whether you are the founder or a participant in the website, the whole idea is to get yourself engage with the community.

Owning your own website

Of course, you will own the community if that website belongs to you.  Or in another way, you can build a Facebook page so as to build your own community as well.  However, the whole process of building a web community is very tedious and unpredictable.  You won’t know if you are going to win the community’s heart or not.

Participating in a website

It is ok to be a participant, rather than the founder.  In fact, you can leverage on the community which is already working well.  Furthermore, there are many ways to participate in a community.  It is not necessary that you have to participate by being a participant.  You can also participate as a sponsor!  As a sponsor, the website will give you enough exposure to be associated with their website and to get yourself started almost immediately.

Participating while owning your own website

It is not true that when you are a participant or a sponsor, you will not be able to own your own website.  Please remember that there is a very big reason why it is called “web”… That’s because the sites are all inter-connected!

Because of the personal touch that a website can give over other types of offline media, there are many ways why the websites are much easier to get your audience engaged with cross-selling, up-selling, down-selling or side-selling contents.

Conclusion

So long as you get yourself connected on the websites, the community that you can bring along with you is really priceless… and they will always be with you because your name is going to be engraved in the Internet forever…

Photo credit: The Firm PR

It became dawn to me that someone is really looking into rejecting traffic from Google which is giving us most of the traffic (in general) today.  When I saw this piece of news about News Corp’s contents to be removed from Google, something just triggers me about the flip side of Google traffic.

What happen?

In that article, Rupert Murdoch maintains that the traffic that comes in from Google is generally consumer market who is looking for products to buy.  It is of no value to the news website who wishes to attract people who likes to read news articles.  It probably will not work for media industry as they are in the paid industry rather than free.  Moreover, Google is giving them really good traffic (it’s like 100k clicks per minute.

Call for decentralization of news

Looking at his perspective, I can understand his reasoning and I really respect him for being so far-sighted about the whole Internet game.  And to be really effective about this whole thing, every paid media industry must play along the same game so as to sustain their businesses online.  It will not be effective and may harm his business if he were to do it alone only.

Original idea of centralization of news

Then, I was thinking from Google’s point of view about this matter.  Google has built up a news platform where we can get news alert and to know the latest news from various sources.  It is probably the perfect platform for any journalist and avid reader who wants to keep up to date about the news in the world.

It seems to me that there has been a lot of struggle of the news to be shown on Google News.  That’s because some piece of news have to be paid, and yet a short clippings of the news are shown on the Google News.  It really frustrates me when I can’t read the whole piece of news when I click into the website because I have to subscribe before reading it! (whether it is free or paid)

Conclusion

I really like the idea of news centralization where I can save a lot of time reading the same topic at one time from different news sources.  It is such a pity that News Corp has such a decision which may or may not cause the rest to follow suit.  No matter what, it’s still a business decision to be made which is always for the good of the big picture.

Photo credit: drew

After tweeting for a while, I find that web design news are pretty sexy because there are a lot of very nice web designs to appreciate and to learn from.  If you have notice my tweets, a lot of them are related to web design too.  It brought me to my attention some of the best web designers in the world (in my opinion!) and to follow them on twitter!

Introducing WordTaps

I wish to highlight this particular website called WordTaps.com.  It is basically a place to gather all the information about a certain topic (in this case, it’s web design and web development).  Over here, it utilizes the twitter power to share with the world on the latest updates.

It is simply an ingenious idea that this person behind WordTaps has done.  I only know him/her through her twitter account @WordTaps.  As I was heavily retweeting a lot of interesting web design topics, @WordTaps was drawn to my attention as I sat aside to notice the website further.

Any similar competitors?

I can still remember the usual Digg.com where we can digg interesting news (but that’s too much information overload with other irrelevant topics), and Delicious.com where we can bookmark some of the interesting websites around.  So far as I know, WordTaps is the only site that provides similar infrastructure like Digg or Delicious (but they are using twitter and tweetmeme in this case).

Niche websites are always the way to go where they can leverage on what has already been popular on the website.  I am actually not very surprised for WordTaps to be born… But I am also appreciative for this website to be up so that I can leverage on it further!

Beneficial for my twitter followers

I believe WordTaps is a pretty new website, and it is already enjoying good visitorship around.  I was also attracted to it myself as it is also helping me to build even more web related information to my twitter followers.  When I click on “Retweet”, it basically triggers Tweetmeme to assist in the retweeting for WordTaps.

Ok, enough of my thoughts about WordTaps.  Take a look yourself at WordTaps and find out if it suits your taste.

Photo Credit: renmeleon

I don’t know if any of you are trying to find out where you can retweet your tweets on schedule.  I have been looking for such a tool desperately actually.  That’s because I have a lot of great tweets to retweet about.  For all of you who have been following me on twitter, you will see me massively flooding your inbox with my retweets.  They are useful tweets actually.  They should be helpful to you if you are interested in them.  If not, you should not follow me because I must have sent you unwanted tweets all along.

Recently, I was introduced by @tommytrc to this twitter program called TweetMiner (affiliate link).  I think it could be an interesting program to review about, hence I decided to write about it in my blog here since Twitter is one of my everyday tools that I use to communicate.

What is TweetMiner?

TweetMiner is not only a program which allows you to retweet on schedule, it also allows you to do much more.  But this retweet schedule is the one that caught my attention when I use it myself.

I am not really sure what this program really is until I give it a try myself.  Take a look at the screenshot below.  (By the way, don’t you think my tweeps are simply giving me too much great tweets to retweet?)

It basically has two types of interface for you to choose.

• You can either use it directly on the website
• Or you can download the Adobe Air application and run it off your operating system.

Once I see all the tweets I am interested to retweet, I can either set a certain date for my retweet to appear in my timeline, or I can even set it to the rolling schedule.  Rolling schedule simply means that I can set the retweets to appear every other minutes (e.g. every 30 minutes? 60 minutes? and so on..)

What’s the advantage of scheduling your retweets?

There are several advantages to this.  Let me do a quick explanation on the advantages.

1. It allows me to retweet all my favorite tweets as much as I can without flooding my followers’ inbox.
2. It also allows me to nurture my followers as I am giving them great information on a more consistent basis.
3. It also allows me to be lazy on the days when I am working on my other things.

If any of you are also using this TweetMiner, do let me know of your opinions too!

Recently, I have reviewed a free ebook at Carl Ocab’s blog known as “The Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies“.  After reading that book myself, I am totally convinced of the knowledge and experience that Gyutae Park has with him.  He has spent 9 years creating websites for himself and working for big companies such as Nokia, The Northern Trust Company, and the Bradford Group.  And he has done quite a lot of consulting job with several people for the website.

Today, he has already launched a new subscription website called The Winners’ Circle.  I have subscribed to his membership myself, and I got myself at the discounted rate of $27 per month for early birds.  After which, he will be keeping it at $47 per month.

I would think that spending $27 to find out more about how the experts think, and how the anaylsis works is really worth it.  Moreover, we get to have a free bonus of finding a niche for ourselves, plus access to his community to communicate with like-minded people.  The return-on-investment can be potentially high, but that’s only if you know how to monetize opportunity.

I don’t think I will re-write any of his sales pitch on my blog.  Just go to his website and find out about his offers yourself.

If you are really serious to make it big online, then it’s time you check out the Winners Circle.

Twitter is something that is so simple, that the normal people will not even understand why a person want to tweet.  And why they want to tweet.  Long time ago, there are friends who ask why there is a need to blog… Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing… And in the end, some of the greatest websites out there are using blog!

So what is twitter?

Twitter is a small little blog for you to post 140 characters.  You can’t really write a lot of things at one shot.  Only a short sentence telling people what you are doing.

Does Twitter really matter?

For those who don’t use Twitter, they will think it is a waste of time.  Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing with your dog?  While there are a lot of people out there who really tweet a lot of messages which seem to be wasting time, they must think again why people are using it…

It’s really not easy to understand until you use it for quite a while yourself.

So what are you doing?

This phrase “What are you doing” doesn’t have to mean what you are doing literally.  We get to see different places adopting the same kind of “What are you doing” such as Facebook and Tumblr.

“What are you doing” can be about any of the following:

• twittering (broadcasting) promotional messages to your followers.
• twittering (logging) the status of your health, your plant, your grades, your height, your weight, your sleeping habits and so on.
• twittering (announcing) your new blog post to your followers.
• twittering (reporting) the happenings that everybody is concern about.
• twittering (socialbookmarking) the great URLs out there who catches it.
• twittering (greeting) to the whole world a very good morning instantly!
• twittering (rumbling) about who should be the latest American Idol.
• twittering (chatting) with your followers about what you have been doing and asking them too.
• twittering (interviewing) with a celebrity online where everybody can sit and listen to the interview, while giving their comments and questions which may or may not be answered.
• twittering (question) the world why is it like that? How is it like that? When is it like that?  It’s like an instant search engine with a personalized answer!
• twittering (telling) the world what you are really doing right now (which is kind of boring to listen to as your followers)

What’s next after telling the world?  Search it!

You will want to hear the valuable information that the world has to tell you about.  You can instantly do a search of the twitter messages to find out what the world is talking about with your selected keywords.

Search is a very powerful tool on twitter.  It may even be taking the place of Google search engine because Twitter messages contain both human voices as well as website links which are relevant to your search.  The web results that come up is determined by human beings, and it is searching based on the latest trends.

Extendable Twitter!

And with so many 3rd party websites out there making use of Twitter API (stands for “Application Programming Interface”), you stand to gain a lot as a twitter user.  Have a good look at what twitter apps are out there.

With the extended applications, you will be able to turn those twitter messages around the world into a goldmine.  A place where you can do a lot of research and finding out for your industry.

What else do you want from Twitter?

Twitter is really just a simple application where it logs our messages at 140 characters.  Though this cap may limit the way how Twitter can expand, it also helps to keep Twitter simple to use and understand the messages.  There have already been too much information out there, all we want is really a short and sweet message to read about.

So to all newbie out there, do you still understand what Twitter is?