Hi there, The Digital Marketer here, ready to help you put the power of the Internet and technology to work for your business.

Are you having trouble managing your calls and contacts and are looking for an online solution? There are free and fee-based services on the Web that could work for you.

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Back to online tools to manage your calls and contacts.

Call Management

Are you looking for a way to better manage the calls you receive or the calls you have to make? I recently signed up for two services to help me with both of those aspects of call management.

Contact Hero is a Web-based and mobile contact manager that helps keep track of not only your contacts but also the calls you need to make. You can make notes about each contact regarding a recent call you've had with them or other key information. You can also enter the date and time for calls you need to place. Contact Hero will email you each day listing out the calls on your agenda. Once you've made them, just mark them as complete.

Contact Hero has a really nice interface for your mobile device. Even I found the interface easy-to-use, and I would currently consider myself very iPhone challenged at the moment. You can download all your contacts as a CSV,  XML or vCard file. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial to test out Contact Hero. The cost of the service after that is $9.99 per month.

To better track calls that I've missed, I'm using SpinVox at S-P-I-N-V-O-X dot com, a voice-to-text service. Because I'm on AT&T, the service is actually being offered through UReach at U-R-E-A-C-H dot com, a partner with SpinVox. For $9.99 US, I can program my mobile phone to forward my missed calls to the SpinVox/UReach number and the voicemail message is converted to text. I've opted to have the text version of my messages sent to me by both SMS on my mobile phone and via email although you can opt for one or the other.

In the last few weeks, I haven't had to check voicemails at all. You'd be surprised how much time you can save eliminating that task.

Contact Management

For more basic contact management, you can try the free and simple Keepm at K-E-E-P-M dot com. You can import your contacts from your Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or several other accounts, edit each contact record and even easily share contacts with others as needed. Sometimes the really basic solutions just get the job done.

Or you can try Plaxo. Plaxo started out as a contact management system online and has morphed into a social network as well with their Plaxo Pulse feature where you can publish status updates viewable by your contacts or post links, videos, photos, and even publish polls.

If you subscribe to Plaxo Mobile Plus and have a BREW-enabled phone with data service, you can sync your contacts to your mobile phone. Or you can try Plaxo Premium for 30 days free. The annual cost of the Premium service is $49.95 and that includes contact duplicate removal and automated backup and recovery for your address book - but it doesn't include Plaxo Mobile Plus.

I'm personally on the fence about Plaxo. Is it a contact management system? Is it a social network? I'm not convinced that a contact database should be a social network although LinkedIn does the contacts/network blend a lot better. Plus LinkedIn helps facilitate networking between you and your contacts as well as the people who your contacts know. I'd rather get warm leads and personal introductions through my contacts than know what my business contacts are having for breakfast via their status updates! But hey, that might just be me.

Contact Me

That's all we have time for today. Visit the show’s website at digitalmarketer.quickanddirtytips.com for links to all of the sites mentioned in the show. If you'd like to ask a question or request a topic for The Digital Marketer, email me at digitalmarketer@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a message by calling 206-339-6279.

And remember to get your web hosting and domain name needs taken care of at GoDaddy.com and use the code POD111 for a 10% discount on any product at GoDaddy.com.

The Digital Marketer's Quick and Dirty Tips for Building Your Business With Web Tools is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips network at quickanddirtytips.com.

aTune in for another business boost from The Digital Marketer, the host who's not afraid to go under the Internet's hood & get a little dirty!

Resources 

Contact Hero - http://www.contacthero.com/

SpinVox/UReach - http://www.ureach.com/spinvox/

SpinVox - http://www.spinvox.com/

Keepm - http://www.keepm.com/

Plaxo - http://www.plaxo.com/

LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/