Communicating With My Business Partner Online

I have a business partner that lives about 3 hours (by car) away from me. Because of this, we had to find some affordable (and free) ways to communicate every day by phone.

• Email: We use gmail and go daddy email addresses with our URL to communicate with one another and our clients.
• Instant Messaging: We talk via gchat, Skype, and Brosix every day to stay in touch so we can chat about clients, projects, and other developments.
• File Sharing: We use Google Documents for a lot of our files that we both need to access. This is especially useful for spreadsheets.
• Text Messaging: We both have iPhones, so we can use iMessage or HeyWire to communicate via WiFi or our phone's data service.

These are just some of the free tools we use to stay in touch and have a successful business partnership.

Do you have any others we can use?

This post sponsored by Brosix, a corporate messenger program available for Android and iPhone.

Using Universal Business Listing for SEO

Because I do a lot of freelance writing work for clients, I enjoy reading up on SEO and other techniques to increase website and search rankings. A recent article by Mark Thompson about Local Business Listings mentioned UniversalBusinessListing.org as a great resource for business owners to submit their businesses to.

I know that SEO is usually a very time-consuming process, especially for small business owners looking to increase their visibility online. UniversalBusinessListing.org can help businesses submit to many directories all at once, thus saving time and energy.

Besides submitting their information to local business listing directories, business owners and employees should also have a well-designed and updated website, blog and share content regularly, and should make sure to promote their website offline through traditional marketing methods.