Ofuz 0.5.8 has quite a few new features, and over 90 across the board improvements. In this blog post, I want to tell you about the new Auto Responder feature in Ofuz.

An Auto Responder is a mailing list feature that sends timed followup messages to your mailing list. You create a sequence of email templates and tell the Auto Responder how long to wait before sending each one. Then, when new people join your mailing list, the Auto Responder sends out your emails at your chosen intervals using the merge fields from your email templates to personalize each email.

Auto Responders can be a great way to convert contacts into customers. Remember the following important facts:

• On average, it takes 7 contacts within 18 months to make a sale. Reference
• 2% of sales are made on the first contact, 3% on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, and 80% on the fifth to twelfth! Reference

Auto Responder sequences should provide interesting or valuable information to your contacts, and it should remind them about the benefits of becoming a customer.

Here’s how to set up an Auto Responder in Ofuz.

1. Sign in to your Ofuz account.
2. Set up any email templates that you plan to use for your Auto Responder.
3. In the top right of the Ofuz page, click Settings.
4. On the left navigation bar, click Auto Responder.
5. Click Create New.
6. In the Auto Responder Name field, type a name for your new Auto Responder.
7. In the Tag Name field, choose the tag that you want to associate with this Auto Responder. Contacts tagged with this tag will receive your new Auto Responder sequence.
8. Click Create.
9. The new Auto Responder appears in your list of Auto Responders. Click the new Auto Responder’s name.
10. Click here to the right of You do not have any auto responder Email Templates for Auto Responder1.
11. Either click Select Email Template and choose an existing email template to add to your Auto Responder, or create a new email template using the form that appears.
12. Fill in the Name field with a name for this template.
13. Fill in the Subject field with the subject you want this email to have.
14. In the Send it in field, type the number of days you want to wait before sending this message.
15. In the Message editor, create your message.
16. Click Create.
17. To create additional emails for this Auto Responder, click Add a new email, and then repeat steps 11 – 16.

That’s all there is to it! Ofuz contacts that are tagged with the tag assigned to your new Auto Responder will automatically receive personalized emails at the intervals you’ve chosen. You can really save yourself some time by combining the Ofuz Web Form feature with the Auto Responder feature.

Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to get a free Ofuz account to take advantage of over 90 enhancements, just released in Ofuz 0.5.8!

We’re wrapping up our three-part series on how to create a free squeeze page using Ofuz with two screencasts, walking you through the process step-by-step.

Creating a squeeze page on a free Blogger.com account:

Creating a squeeze page on a self-hosted WordPress blog:

Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to get a free Ofuz account to take advantage of over 90 enhancements, just released in Ofuz 0.5.8!

We’re excited to announce a new version of Ofuz that includes almost 100 changes, new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

We listen to our users, and your feedback really drives our development. In this release of Ofuz, about 90% of the changes are directly based on your feedback. Please keep the feedback coming!

Some of the new features include:

• Taxes on Invoices (global and per line)
• PDF invoices can be downloaded from Ofuz and sent by email
• Payments can be applied to multiple invoices
• Client view includes a list of all the invoices due
• Auto Responders allow you to create a series of email templates and attach to a tag
• View all your invoices for the year by default instead of Month by Month
• Update the invoices status, so you can manually set an invoice as Sent
• Cancel invoices and delete proposals
• Copy a note, file or document from a contact to a project
• Attached Tasks to Contact and Project
• Notes can now contain some HTML tags
• View Tasks grouped by projects

Private client link with invoice view and online payment

We are very exited about this new release as we have now reached feature parity most of our competitors in the Online Invoicing space. Remember that Ofuz does invoicing and has powerful contact management, group emailing, and task management features!

We are now getting closer to our next major release, Ofuz 0.6. That release will be available as a web-based application at Ofuz.com and as an Open Source download.

Stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, sign up for a free Ofuz account now.

In the first part of this blog post series, we talked about why you might want to create a squeeze page to build your mailing list.

Now, let’s talk about how to do it. Here’s what you need to get started:

First, we’ve created something of value to give away to people we think would make good customers. That Thing of Value is a short ebook we’ve written specifically to appeal to people who might make good paying customers.

All they need to do to get the free ebook is provide us with their name and email address, and permission to contact them in the future.

Second, we’ve got an Ofuz.com account. That’s the other big part of this solution. You can sign up for mailing list management through Aweber or Mailchimp, but those products are often overkill for what the small business or freelancer needs to do. Ofuz, on the other hand, is just right for folks who need to manage several small or medium size mailing lists. That’s us, so let’s get started!

Here’s the process:

1. We’ll create a WordPress page where potential customers can download our free ebook. It will be “invisible,” meaning that it’s not linked to by any page or post on our site.

   Note: WordPress.com, for security reasons, blocks all embedded forms, even safe ones like your Ofuz web form. So, to use this technique, use another free hosted blog service like Blogger.com, or use a self-hosted WordPress installation. We’ll show you both methods in the screencast later this week.

2. Create an Ofuz web form. Directions for doing that are found here. Make sure the thank you page for the Ofuz form is set to the URL for the download page you created in the previous step.
3. Create a WordPress page where your squeeze page text and the Ofuz web form will go. The squeeze page contains text that describes the value of what you are giving away, politely asks for permission to use their email address in exchange for the freebie, and contains the embed code for your Ofuz web form.

That’s all there is to it!

In the final part of this blog post, we’ll have a short screencast that walks you through setting up a free squeeze page using WordPress and Ofuz.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime sign up for a free Ofuz account now!

I recently was contacted by a potential customer who was completely off my radar. He hadn’t written me in months, but I had been keeping in touch with him. You, known, sending him the ocassional update on what I’ve been up to, what new things I’ve learned and think are cool. Like we talk about here. He never responded to these emails, but this week he wrote out of the blue to let me know I’m still on his short list for work.

That’s one small example of the power of repeated contact. All advertising is based on the principle that familiarity is a big part of the decision to buy. That principle can apply to freelancers, small businesses, and anyone else who wants to increase their sales. Before we go any further along this line of reasoning, let’s look at some of the things that good marketers take for granted:

• On average, it takes 7 contacts within 18 months to make a sale. Reference
• 2% of sales are made on the first contact, 3% on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, and 80% on the fifth to twelfth! Reference
• You better have two things before you contact someone:
  • Their permission
  • Something of value to offer them

The takeaway: If you want to convert a contact into a customer, you need to make repeated contacts to do so. An opt-in email list can be the best way to stay in touch with contacts, contact them repeatedly, and convert them into customers.

One way to build an opt-in email list is a squeeze page. This is based on what’s known as the give-get exchange. You give something of value to people who are likely to want what you have to sell, and in return they give you their email address and their permission to receive emails from you.

If you’re going to create a squeeze page (and we recommend you do, or at least work on building an email list of potential customers), then keep the following things in mind:

• The difference between spam and email that will help you get new customers is value (and permission). The email must have something of value for your list.
• Be careful how often you contact your list. Remember that “familiarity breeds contempt,” so keep your emails to-the-point and not too frequent!

In the next post, we’ll walk you though building a squeeze page using Ofuz and WordPress. Stay tuned, and sign up now for a free Ofuz account.

I just tested and confirmed that Philipe has enabled the Contact Sync feature to work with Google Apps.  That means that if you are using a custom domain handled by Google, you can synchronize your contacts with Ofuz.  This will allow you to then invoice, time track, and collaborate with any of your contacts.  Give it a try!

For more information about importing contacts, check out this blog post.

Keeping in Touch: Micro Mailing for the Solo Entrepreneur.

As a small business, very small business actually, we have to always keep one eye on business development. We always want to be the first person that comes to mind when potential customers have a project that we can do. You  could create a mailing list and send out bulk emails with any of the email marketing tools that are out there. However, email readers are notoriously unwilling to read another generic, nicely formatted newsletter. If you are sending these out, you would be fortunate if one fourth (25%) of your recipients actually read your email.

That is not what we are looking for in customer contacts.  We want to have personal communication with potential clients.  So, instead of collecting a thousand email addresses of questionable value, we send out “micro mails” using Ofuz.

An Example Micro Mail:

The past three months have been a pretty busy time for us .  Philip has been deeply engaged in white papers and other collateral on virtualization subjects, including deep technical dives and sales focused documents to show the value of virtualization in the new IT environments.  He is working so much on virtualization that he has started to act virtual himself.  On really busy days he loses his normally shiny presence and I can actually see through him.

We tried to make the case with the IRS come tax time that since he was virtual he did not need to pay actual taxes.  They did not go for it.

• A Learning Management System  and courseware for a client that is developing a complex — but really really cool — software tool that will help to control the Bonneville dams.  A lot of people need to be ramped up on a whole new mission critical user interface and we are going to build a learning tool to get them all ramped up.
• We have been investigating podcast, both audio and video, as a way to deliver our customers’ message. Research has shown that by adding podcasts to your marketing delivery, you can increase your exposure.  We see that as a way to multiply the value of content across multiple platforms. We could take your white paper and affordably turn it into a podcast that appeals to a whole new audience.

We hope your endeavors are keeping you just the right level of busy.  What kinds of things are you working on these days?

Tips for Your Micro Email Campaign

• Keep it brief or they won’t read it at all.
• Let people know what service you offer.
• Give them ideas of how you can help them.
• Give them something of value or something entertaining
• Ask about how their business is going.
• Like any good marketing piece, end with a call to action.  Some times I like to couch this in the form of a question as I did in the example above: “What kinds of things are you working on these days?”

How to Make A Micro Email

1. Click Settings (top right of the page).
2. Click Sync.
3. Click Google.
4. Click Import Contacts.
5. In the Email field, type your Gmail address and then click Import.

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click in the white space next to each contact you want to tag.
3. The white space around the selected contacts will become light yellow.
4. In the text box above the selected contacts, type the tag you want to assign to those contacts.
5. Click add tags.

When it is time to create a message, use the Search by Tags feature to select all of your prospects.

Then, send a simple, readable email to these prospects. Don’t go overboard with formatting; this is a personal email, not a bulk newsletter. Use the Insert Merge Fields to add business name, contact name, and the contact’s position wherever it is appropriate in the email.

Follow-through is Critical

Using a tool like Ofuz to manage your contacts is great, but the follow-through is always up to you. As with other functions that are critical to our freelancer, he can use Ofuz to stay on top of what needs to happen next with his contacts. Maybe it’s a followup call to discuss a project idea, or a thank-you note for work that’s just been paid for.

Ofuz offers two features that help our freelancer get an A in follow-through: contact notes, and contact tasks.

A note is attached to the contact, and provides additional information about that contact. Things like the results of the last interaction with that contact, important things to remember for that contact, etc. Our freelancer adds a not to a contact this way:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click on the name of the contact you want to add a note to (the name will be highlighted in blue).
3. In the Add a Note About <contactname> field, type your note.
4. If you want to attach a file to the note, change privacy settings for the note, or notate time for your timesheet, click more options. Otherwise, click Add this note.

Our freelancer can also attach tasks to a contact. These are used for more action-oriented items, like reminders to call the contact by a certain date. Tasks attached to contacts show up in the Ofuz dashboard, just like tasks attached to a project. To attach a task to a contact, our freelancer simply:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click the contact’s name.
3. The contact details page appears.
4. On the left, click add new task.
5. The Add a Task box appears.
6. Fill out the Task description, due date, category, and project fields.
7. Click Add this task.

Building Your Network With Ofuz

Ofuz offers a great way to passively build your network. You can create a web form, which you then add to your web site. Site visitors can fill out the web form to be added to your Ofuz contact list automatically. When you use a web form, you’ll also want to use the feature that tags contacts created when someone fills out the web form. That way, you can identify which contacts were created through the web form.

Here’s how to create a web form:

1. Click Settings (top right of window)
2. Click Web Forms (left side of window)
3. In the Form Title field, type the name you want to use to identify your web form.
4. In the list of fields, select the ones you want to include on your web form.
5. In the Tags for those contacts field, type the tag you want to use for new contacts that are created when someone fills out your web form.
6. In the Web address to take the user after submitting the form field, type a URL where users will be directed after submitting the form.
7. Click Create.

Another great, easy way to create new contacts is to use the Ofuz email dropbox:

1. Click Settings (top right of the page).
2. Click Drop Box Note.
3. Take note of the email address under Drop Box Note Setup.
4. CC the email address from step 3 and a new Ofuz contact will be created (if necessary) and a copy of the email will be attached to the contact as a note.

Staying Billable With Ofuz

Ofuz helps you stay billable by integrating your contact list with your workflow. From contact management to creating new contacts, Ofuz connects your contact list with your task management in a way that helps the freelancer spend less time on the administrative tasks of sales and lead generation, and more time on billable work!

See how Ofuz can help you. Sign up for a free account now.

In the first blog post in this series, we talked about Friction Losses and Opportunity Losses. Ofuz is chock full of task management and collaboration tools that help freelancers reduce Friction Losses.

Ofuz also helps you reduce Opportunity Losses. An Opportunity Loss is when you’re so busy doing your thing that you don’t have time to develop new business opportunities and leads. Ofuz allows you to import contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other CSV file source. After you’ve gotten all of your contacts into Ofuz, you can start to use the mailing list management, contact tagging, and note-taking capabilities in Ofuz to work your network and avoid opportunity losses.

Unifying Your Contacts Using Ofuz

Ofuz makes it easy for our freelancer to import his existing contacts from a variety of sources. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, vCards, and any CSV-formatted list of contacts is game for importing to Ofuz. Our freelancer does the following to import contacts from his Gmail account into Ofuz:

1. Click Settings (top right of the page).
2. Click Sync.
3. Click Google.
4. Click Import Contacts.
5. In the Email field, type your Gmail address and then click Import.

Creating new contacts in Ofuz is also dead simple:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. In the top left of the page, click add new contact.
3. Complete the Add a new contact form.
4. Click Add this person.

Now that our freelancer has all of his contacts in Ofuz, he can use the powerful tagging feature in Ofuz to categorize and selectively act on these contacts. Let’s say that our freelancer wants to create four categories for his contacts:

• Current Customers
• Prospects
• Past Customers
• Peers

To tag multiple contacts, our freelancer would simply:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click in the white space next to each contact you want to tag.
3. The white space around the selected contacts will become light yellow.
4. In the text box above the selected contacts, type the tag you want to assign to those contacts.
5. Click add tags.

A Short Detour: Why Email For Marketing and Lead Generation?

Next to ranking highly in search engine results, email marketing is the most effective way to generate sales. This is true for large corporations, and it’s true for a freelancer. A Direct Marketing Association (DMA) survey for 2009 showed that email marketing returns $43.62 for every dollar spent. We’re not talking about SPAM here, but targeted email to people who have given you their permission to send them emails. That DMA survey isn’t just an isolated data point. Surveys by Forbes, Datran Media, and Shop.org also agree about the effectiveness of email marketing. Read this handy guide to email marketing for the freelancer.

Because you can assign multiple tags to a single contact, you don’t have to pick only one category for each contact. For example, our freelancer can have contacts who are both past customers and prospects. This multiple tagging feature allows our freelancer to be very selective when sending group emails to his contacts. With Ofuz, he creates very specific group mailings — without needing separate mailing list management software.

For example, he can create an email template for a newsletter. He can use the newsletter to provide current and past customers with relevant, useful information like tips related to their business, along with incentives to hire our freelancer. By sending periodic emails to past customers, our freelancer stays at the top of their list for future gigs.

Conclusion

A lot of freelancers are trying to find a way out of a familiar feast and famine cycle. The key to a sustainable freelance business is steady, constant business development. Linking your contacts and your business development to Ofuz means that even in your busiest times you can manage to keep your prospects warm – filling in all those famine times with more contracts.

In part two of this blog post, we’ll look at how how Ofuz can help you generate new leads for your mailing list.

In the meantime, sign up for a free Ofuz account to see for yourself how easy it is to manage your contacts using Ofuz.

In the previous post we saw how our freelancer can use Ofuz task notes, bulk emails, and the file sharing portal to streamline their day-to-day workflow. Today we’ll see how our freelancer gets things done with less effort using the great task and timesheet management functionality of Ofuz.

Integrated Task Management

Ofuz has a terrific set of task management features. Tasks are linked to a project, and each task can have a due date, a category, and notes.

Previously, our freelancer was using two applications to manage tasks and time for his workflow. He was using Harvest for timesheets, and Basecamp for task and project management. Although he was pretty pleased with the functionality of these two tools, he disliked having to manage multiple logins and interfaces. He was often copying data from one to the other, and his computer screen was clogged with browser windows.

When he switched to Ofuz for task and time management, our freelancer’s workflow started to look like this:

1. Login to Ofuz at the start of the workday.
2. Use the Dashboard tab in Ofuz to see what tasks are due today.
3. While working on each task, attach task notes to record items of interest and time spent on each task.
4. The client, or other project stakeholders, can use the email task dropbox to create new tasks for our freelancer, even if they don’t have an account on Ofuz.com!

The value of Ofuz to our freelancer is that he has a single unified interface to manage both his tasks and the time spent doing them. He can stop using multiple tools to do what really is a single job, and this reduces the Friction Loss of switching tools throughout the workday. In addition, our freelancer’s client feels like they have better access to their freelancer because they can submit new tasks directly to his To Do list.

Let’s take a look at a few key task-management features in Ofuz.

First, you can create new tasks either for a project or for a contact. A task that is attached to a project would be used to organize and track the time for completing that project. Attaching tasks to a project is very easy:

1. Click the Projects tab.
2. In the Add a Project Task box on the left of the page, type a task name in the Task name field.
3. Choose due dates and a category for the task.
4. Click Add this task.

Ofuz also allows you to attach tasks to a contact. Our freelancer would use this feature when he wants to use tasks to track client interactions, or to remind him about actions he needs to take with a certain contact. Attaching tasks to a contact is also very easy:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click the contact’s name.
3. The contact details page appears.
4. On the left, click add new task.
5. The Add a Task box appears.
6. Fill out the Task description, due date, category, and project fields.
7. Click Add this task.

After creating a number of tasks, Ofuz lets you organize task priorities with a drag and drop interface:

1. Click the Projects tab.
2. Click the name of the project that has tasks you want to prioritize.
3. The project detail page appears.
4. Use the task handle icon (it looks like four short horizontal lines ) to move the tasks into the order you want.

Integrated Timesheets

By not using a separate application to track time, our freelancer spends less of his day on these unbillable chores. As he types in notes on either contacts or tasks, he can easily notate the time spent on each item for future reference. In addition, the Ofuz timesheet feature makes it easy for our freelancer to see time spent by project over any time period.

To track time for a task:

1. Click the Tasks tab.
2. Find the task you want to enter time for (or Add a new task) and then click the comment icon to the right of the task name.
3. The task detail page will appear.
4. In the task note field, type an explanatory note.
5. Below the task comment field, click More Options.
6. In the Hours Worked field, type the number of hours to enter for this task note.
7. Enter any other information you need to, and then click Add this item.

Just like Ofuz has tasks for both Projects and Contacts, it has time tracking for Projects and Contacts. To track time spent interacting with a contact (like a phone call, etc.), our freelancer would:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click the name of the contact you want to attach a time entry to.
3. In the contact comment field, type an explanatory note.
4. Below the contact comment field, click more options (towards the bottom of the page)
5. In the Hours Worked field, type the number of hours to enter for this contact note.
6. Enter any other information you need to, and then click Add this note.

And to see his timesheet, our freelancer would:

1. From anywhere, click the Dashboard tab.
2. Towards the top of the page, click Timesheet.
3. View the timesheet. If necessary, change the date range at the top of the timesheet page.

The Bottom Line

How has our freelancer reduced his Friction Losses by using Ofuz?

• Our freelancer has reduced time that would be wasted by moving from one application to another by using a single application for unified contact management, task management, file sharing, time tracking, project notation, mailing list management, and client collaboration.
• Our freelancer has increased his client’s understanding of the projects progress by providing his client, co-workers, and sub-contractors with granular updates on project developments. This helps identify problems sooner and enhance communication. These client updates also serve as project documentation, which our freelancer can refer back to at any time.
• Our freelancer has given his client a tighter connection to the project with less effort than using a separate tool for this by creating a client project portal, and allowing his client to use email to assign task to his To Do list

Stay tuned for the next blog post where we will start to look at how a Ofuz helps our freelancer reduce Opportunity Losses!

In the meantime, sign up for a free Ofuz account to see for yourself how it can help you!