Splashtop is an iPhone and iPad application that allows you to access your computer from anywhere and do just about anything you could do on the computer, remotely.

If you’re downloading programs, you can manage your downloads remotely. If you need a file on your computer, you can use your iPhone to start an upload. You can even use it to turn off your computer, if you accidentally left it on. The applications are endless.

Here’s how to use Splashtop to access your computer from anywhere.

Step 1: Download and Install Splashtop

Download the Splashtop desktop application at: http://www.splashtop.com/streamer

Download the iPhone application from the iTunes store.

Start by installing the desktop application.

Step 2: Choose a Password

The password you choose should be extremely difficult to guess, with a combination of letters and numbers. For extra security, have uppercase and lowercase letters.

Remember that anyone who guesses this password could potentially access your whole computer. Pick a unique, non-word difficult to guess password.

Click “Next,” then “Continue.” When setup is complete, you’ll see this screen:

Step 3: Enable Internet Discovery

Once the setup is complete, you’ll be able to access your computer from your iPhone if you’re on the same wifi network.

But if you want to access your computer from anywhere on the internet, which will usually be the case, you’ll need to enable internet discovery.

Click on “Settings” along the top of the Splashtop application.

Then check “Enable Internet Discovery.”

Once checked, click the “Google” button to enter your login information. Splashtop uses Google for its internet discovery, so you’ll need a Google account to use it properly.

If the login information worked, you’ll see this confirmation:

That’s all the setup you need to do on the desktop application.

Step 4: Find Your PC on Your iPhone

Now that your PC is setup to be controlled by another device, here’s how to connect the two.

Upon launching your iPhone application, you’ll see a primarily blank screen. Click the “Settings” button in the upper right corner.

Then click “Internet Discovery.”

Enter your login information.

Step 5: Accessing Your PC

After connecting to your Google account, the Splashtop app will use the login information to find your PC. Go back to the main screen and access your PC by clicking on its name.

Enter your password.

You’ll now be in control of your computer from your iPhone.

Step 6: Navigating the Interface

Splashtop will present you with a list of finger / mouse commands and operations the first time you log in.

This is an example of what your computer screen might look like on your iPhone.

To access your keyboard, click the little black button in the lower right.

The keyboard will then pop up.

Congratulations! You’ve now learned how to setup Splashtop on both your desktop and your iPhone. You’ll be able to do just about anything you can do on your computer from your iPhone interface, including processing-heavy tasks, because it’s processed by your computer rather than your iPhone.

Whether you’re promoting awareness of a certain cause, want more traffic to your blog or are promoting your business, Pinterest offers a unique opportunity to get your message out there through the use of images.

Another great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need have to have a lot of followers to be seen. Pinterest is a very open website and people are always searching for images and topics of interest, so it’s easy to get started right away.

Here are 8 ideas for marketing on Pinterest. Feel free to use them, adapt them and expand on them. There are so many possibilities.

#1 URL / Logo on Your Photos

Consider adding a little logo or URL to the images you place on your website. That way, when people pin your content or you pin your own, the source is immediately visible. Just make sure to keep it rather subtle. You don’t want to take away from the quality of your image as that may reduce the numbers of shares.

Here’s an example of pin someone made from retrojunk.com

#2 Suggest Gifts

One of the things you may have noticed searching around Pinterest is that they have a gifts category. You can pin a gift idea simply by putting a $ amount in the description of your pin. When you enter the dollar amount, it is automatically added to the image and it will be listed in the gift ideas too.

Then when you search for gifts in the price range, yours will appear at the top.

#3 Photo Contests

Have fun with Pinterest and try running a photo contest. For example, if you sell craft kits or some type of DIY project kits, invite your customers to post their results photos for entry into your contest. Display the photos in a special photo contest board.

Or if you’re promoting a cause, have people submit photos on what the cause means for them and display the photos.

#4 Sweepstakes

Many companies are creating “Pin it to Win It” sweepstakes giveaways.  In some cases, they, get people to repin an image with a specific description. In many of these contests, the winner receives the prize in the picture or you can come up with another prize if you’d like.

In others, companies are asking their customers to create a board of their favorite products and enter it for consideration in the contest. Here’s a pin board created by a LandsEnd.com contest winner:

If you’d like to learn more about how Lands’ End’s contest worked, here is a press release with the information: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lands-end-canvas-launches-pin-it-to-win-it-contest-on-pinterest-135591673.html

#5 Coupons

Create some attractive and hard-to-resist coupons that can be repinned and shared on Pinterest. You can create your own coupon and add a “Pin It” button to your coupon page. You can also look at sites like CouponNetwork.com who encourage the social sharing of coupons.

Here’s an example of a coupon available through Coupon Network:

Again, you can post your own coupons directly and encourage repinning. Have fun with your coupons by adding humor and more. Just make sure the images are relevant to your offer.

#6 QR Codes

If you have a collection or QR codes, create a board for them and add new ones when you have them. Just make sure to include a good description and categorize your board, so they’ll be easily found.

Or if you’re a blogger, who connects your followers with great information, collect QR codes from around the web that would interest them.

#7 Collaboration

Pinterest provides amazing opportunities for collaborating. You can invite people to contribute to your boards for a specific event or project. You can add contributors whenever you set up a new board or you can add them by editing your existing boards.

Why not showcase the development of your next product or slowly leak details about an important upcoming function? You’ll build buzz and hopefully get better results in the process.

#8 Holiday and Seasonal Marketing

Pinterest offers unique marketing opportunities throughout the year. As users prepare for Easter or Independence Day, they’re searching for recipes, crafts, entertaining ideas and more. Or if summer’s coming, they’re getting ready to go boating, camping and they start grilling more. Always keep seasonal needs in mind and create special boards for holidays, activities and more.

Here’s a Game Day Food Ideas example:

How can you incorporate something like this into your niche? What is your target market looking for?

Start Marketing…But Proceed with Care!

Now that you have a few ideas ready to run with, go for it. But before you run off, remember that just like with other social networks, your success will depend on your being a valuable contributor to the community. Focus on providing images that are useful, funny, inspiring, thought-provoking or aesthetically pleasing…rather than worrying about simply selling your products directly.

Technorati Tags: shortener, url

Part of the fun of Pinterest, is inviting and finding the friends you already know and finding new people with similar interests as well. This tutorial will show you how to find all those people and more

Searching for People

To find people with similar interests, you can look under “Everything” and choose a category that interests you.

You can also look at the list of people who are following you to see if you might be interested in following them back. You can see their names, profile pictures and some of their recent pins. Just click “Follow” if you want to follow someone. You can click “Unfollow” if you later change your mind.

Search for Someone by Name

Pinterest has the ability to search for pins, but its ability to search for people is not always reliable. However, what you can do is enter a name in the search box:

On the results page, choose “People” to get your people results. In this case, we can easily find the person we’re looking for.

In the case where you can’t find what you’re looking for, one easy way to find specific people you’re looking for is by conducting a Google search of “[NAME] Pinterest.” For example:

If the person has a Pinterest account, you’re likely to see it near the top of the search results. In this case we see two results at the top and I’ll explain the difference between the two.

The first result shows a URL that has “source” in it. This link shows images that any Pinterest users have shared from Martha Stewart’s website. The second one that doesn’t say “source” and reads as pinterest.com/marthastewart is her actual Pinterest profile, so if you want to follow her specifically, use that link.

Follow People or Boards

You might find that you’re particularly interest in specific boards, rather than users in general. You can actually choose exactly what or who you follow.

To Follow a Person:

Go the person’s profile and select “Follow All” and you will follow all their boards and updates.

To Follow Board:

Go to a specific board and select “Follow Board” and you’ll get updates from the board only.

The nice thing about Pinterest is that it’s very open and you don’t have to worry about following a bunch of people to start with, just to start enjoying the site. There is a lot of interaction between people, even if they’re not following each other. So my advice is to find a few people to follow, start pinning and have fun.

Pinterest is a relatively new social networking site with a twist.

It’s all about creating and sharing collections of images that you find around the web or create yourself. They call it themselves a “Virtual Pin Board’ and their members use it to organize recipes, plan home improvement projects, share favorite books, plan weddings and more. You’re only limited by your imagination.

Pinterest currently has about 25 million users and about 80% of their audience is female, but there is definitely male representation on the site.

Register

If you go to Pinterest.com, you can click the “Join Pinterest” button.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be greeted by this message.

Setting Up Your Account

In order to use Pinterest, you have to either register with a Facebook or Twitter account. They say they do this because they believe it makes it easier for people to find you, cuts down on spam and you can easily share your updates with those sites. It doesn’t matter if you start by registering with Facebook or Twitter, you can link both accounts at a later date.

We’re going to go through the process by signing up with Twitter, so we click “Or sign up with Twitter.”

Don’t worry about Pinterest doing things with your Twitter account that you don’t want it to. You have complete control and if you don’t want Pinterest to update anything on Twitter, you can set it that way too. If it sounds good, click “Sign In” as shown above.

On the next page, you’ll see that Pinterest automatically grabbed your avatar (we’ve blacked out this one for privacy reasons). Then you can choose a username, add your email address and password.

Click “Create Account” when you’re done. Next you’ll be presented with 28 categories that you can choose as being related to your interests. Pinterest uses this information to automatically follow people with common interests. You have to pick at least one category to continue.

When you’re done choosing, click “Follow People” at the bottom of the screen.

On the page page, you’ll be able to see who you are now following and remove them, if you prefer. If everything’s a-okay then you can start creating boards.

On the next page, you’ll see five suggested boards you can create. You can edit these, delete these or do whatever you want. If you’re not sure about all the boards you’re going to create, you can just start with one and add as many as you want later. You can also see further suggestions to the right. If you click one of those, it will automatically be added to your list.

Click “Create” when you’re done deciding on your boards. Again, you can add whatever you want or delete any boards later too. Now you’re ready to get started with Pinterest!

In many ways, the Google Penguin update really tossed up a lot of what the internet marketing world thought they knew about SEO. Many old linkbuilding tactics, such as buying .edu links, mass blog comment posting or article directory submissions not only lost value, but could actually come back and hurt your rankings.

Today, the search engine game has more and more become about getting real, genuine backlinks back to your website. Low quality backlinks have lost massive value, while high quality backlinks are gaining more weight.

In addition, Google is placing more emphasis on person to person relationships. In other words, social media relationships are beginning to play more of a part in search engine rankings.

It’s safe to assume that Google Penguin won’t be Google’s last big tossup. As search engine technology and especially the AI technology that was developed for Panda evolve, we can expect more big changes to roll out. More likely than not, these changes will further deemphasize low quality linking and prop up high quality linking even more.

So in the post-panda world, what can you do to build more backlinks and build your rankings? Read on.

#1) Guest Blogging

One fantastic way to build links to any website is to write guest blogs. What’s amazing about guest blogging is that not only do you get high quality links back to your website, but you also get to put your content right in front of real people in your industry.

There are a few different ways to write guest blogs. The easiest way is to head over to MyBlogGuest.com and find other blogs in your industry who want your content.

This is fantastic for links, but most high quality, high traffic blogs won’t be advertising for guest posts this way.

Instead, you need to approach them directly. Try to build a relationship with them by commenting on their blogs and interacting with them over Twitter. Build high quality content on your own website.

Then, when you think you can provide something of value to their audience, send them a message directly with your proposal.

#2) Genuine Web 2.0 Links

Another great source of links is genuine Web 2.0 properties. These include Squidoo, Hubpages or any other kinds of websites where you can create your own content and have it distributed to a real community of people.

The key to creating these kinds of Web 2.0 properties is to create high quality pages. A lot of marketers simply spam Squidoo or other similar sites with low quality content. This doesn’t work.

Instead, you need to create high quality content that actually gets voted for on these sites. On Hubpages for example, you want to create pages that actually get a high Hubscore.

When you create a high quality Web 2.0 property, people will comment on it, interact with it and link to it. Google will often rank the page highly. Any links you point to your site from that property will be hugely beneficial to your site.

#3) Help a Reporter Out

One of the best ways to get in contact with reporters who need stories is Help a Reporter Out (HARO.) This is a free site where reporters who need sources go to post what they need.

Sign up for their newsletter. Anytime a reporter requests a source in your area of expertise, contact them. Get in touch and let them pick your brains about the topic.

This benefits you in a few ways. First, they’ll often link to your website right then and there. Make sure you ask them to make the link active, as often newspapers will just write your site in text without linking.

Second however, you build a relationship with that journalist. If you keep doing this, you’ll soon have a small rolodex of press people who’re in your debt. When you next launch a creative or edgy product, you can get in touch with them and manufacture your own press blitz.

#4) Contact Your Commenters

If you run a blog, discussion board or website that has any kind of social interaction, chances are other people who also have websites are going to contact you.

Whenever you receive a comment from someone who says they love your site, get in touch with them. See if you can arrange some sort of backlink deal with them.

These people already love your content. Getting them to agree to have you write a guest post or even give a free link back to you on a relevant page shouldn’t be too difficult.

#5) Build Real Relationships

Go to conferences and cultivate real, genuine relationships. Meet people face to face and engender goodwill.

A lot of people will link to you if they like you and you ask. In fact, for many high profile individuals that’s the only way you can get them to link back to you.

People with massive twitter followings or blog followings are very rarely going to link to you if you just ask them out of the blue. They don’t know you and receive a dozen such requests every day.

On the other hand, if you meet them in person, have a good conversation and develop a rapport, there’s a very good chance they’ll do you that favor. That’s how you get the PR5 and PR6 backlinks – Through real personal relationships.

#6) Social Bookmarking Websites

Getting your content to the front of a social bookmarking website like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon is a fantastic way to drive tons and tons of traffic your way. If you’re making this a genuine goal of yours, make sure your server is setup to handle the traffic.

If you do manage to get your post ranked highly on a social bookmarking site, you’ll see tens of thousands of people flooding into your website. Don’t be alarmed if the bounce rate is much higher than usual or the time on site much lower. The quality of traffic from these sites tends to be lower, as people on these sites click many links in a short period of time.

The real value you’ll get from getting on the front of a social bookmarking site is through the links you’ll build. If you land on the front of reddit, you’re going to get dozens or even hundreds of backlinks in a matter of hours or days. These will help your rankings for the rest of your site’s life.

#7) Build a Strong Social Media Presence

Google is paying more and more attention to social media. Already Google +1s carry a ton of weight. If someone +1s any of your content, there’s a great chance that your site will be popping up very often in the search results.

Create a popular fan page. Be active on Twitter. Get Google +1s. If you’re not already active on social media, now is the time. The time for webmasters to “wait and see if it matters” is over.

Experts have said it. Web stats have said it. Users have said it and now the search engines are saying it: Social media matters. Today, not only will it drive visitors, but it’ll drive rankings as well.

Social media links might not matter in the traditional PageRank passing sense, but having a strong social media presence will still certainly help your rankings.

#8) Do an Interview

Find experts in your niche and interview them about the subject.

When you do this, the expert will often link to you. Other people will link to you. It’ll be fantastic for search rankings, for twitter, for Facebook, for your email list and for building traction all around.

Again, the key to getting people to agree to be interviewed is to build personal relationships. Either that, or build relationships with key networkers who can introduce you to other influential people.

#9) Start a Video Series

Videos are a fantastic way to both get new visitors and improve your relationship with your old ones.

Start a video series and publish it regularly. Get people in the habit of receiving content from you. People who love your content will watch and share your videos regularly. Keyword optimize your videos and there’s a great chance that you’ll rank highly on Google or YouTube.

These are nine linkbuilding tactics you can use today to generate real, genuine links that post-penguin Google will love. What’s more is that these linkbuilding tactics will most likely survive the next Google update, and the one after that. These links aren’t built on quick-fix solutions, but actually get you real endorsements from real people. Give it a try and come back and tell us of your success.

Want to interact with your friends with both voice and video?

You can, with Skype’s video call features. As long as you and your friend have webcams built in or connected to a computer, you can use Skype’s video call features.

Alternatively, you can also do a video call with the iPhone 4’s built in camera and the Skype iPhone app.

To make a video call using Skype, follow these steps.

Step 1: Select the Person to Call

Double click on the person you want to call. The call box will pop up.

Step 2: Click Video Call

Click on the video call button to initiate a video call.

When the person on the other end of the call picks up the call, you’ll see the connected video call window. It looks like this:

Once connected, you’ll be able to see your friend in the upper screen and yourself in the lower screen. The lower screen enables you to see exactly how you look to your friend.

Connecting a video call is that simple. Here are a few more options for the video call:

Step 3: Video Options

Hover your mouse over the top of the screen to see the video options bar.

Here’s what each of these options does:

Snapshot: Saves a picture of the screen.

Full screen: Enlarges the video to a full screen view.

Zoom in: Zoom in on your friend.

Pop-out: Pops the video out of the chat window, making it smaller and more maneuverable.

Step 4: More Tools

Along the bottom of the call box are a few more tools for managing the video chat.

#1 – Ends the call.

#2 – Mutes your microphone.

#3 – Adjust the volume of your mic.

#4 – Invite more people to this video chat.

#5 – Hover over this button to see your video feed.

#6 – Screen sharing.

#7 – Show the dial pad.

#8 – Show the chat box.

#9 – Like a cell phone, this box will light up with bars showing you how strong your connection is.

That’s it! You now know how to make a video call and how to adjust the video call options. Making a video call may seem daunting if you’ve never done it before, but in reality it’s just a few clicks away.

Technorati Tags: calling, for, girl, one

Twitter provides you with an easy copy-and-paste cod that allows you show your most recent updates on any Twitter page.

And technically, it can be used to show the most recent update on any Twitter account. The only exception is that it does not work on private accounts.

To customize and create your profile widget, go to: CLICK HERE 

Settings

To start with, make sure you have the correct username in the Settings:

Preferences

On the left menu, click “Preferences” and you have a few options:

Let’s talk about these preference options mean…

• Poll for New Results: Tweets will appear in real time if this is checked. Otherwise, static tweets will appear.

• Include Scrollbar: This will include a scrollbar in the widget if checked.

• Behavior: This section allows you to choose between “Timed interval” or “Load all tweets” and decide how many tweets to be shown in the widget. “Timed interval” means that new tweets will be shown up to the maximum at an interval you specify. “Load all tweets” means all the tweets will be loaded to the maximum, without any time interval.

• Show Avatars: Choose this if you want your avatar to appear beside each tweet.

• Show Timestamps: Choose this if you want the timestamp to appear for each tweet.

• Show Hashtags: Choose this if you want any hashtags in your tweets to appear. They will be clickable in the widget.

Appearance

Now you can customize the colors of the widget. You can match your website, come up with your own color scheme or whatever you wish. Simply click the color box and you can select a color using the easy color-selecting tool. Click “Done” when you’ve chosen the colors you want.

You can customize the background and text in the “shell”, which is the outer-edges of the widget. You can also specify the background and text of your actual tweets. And finally, you can specify the color of hyperlinks in the widget.

Dimensions

The final customization you can make to the widget are its dimensions. You can either a specify a height and width or you can choose “auto width” which will automatically resize the widget, according to the space provided and the height required to display the tweets.

Test Settings & Grab Code

Once you’ve adjusted all your settings, you can go to the bottom of the page and test the settings or grab the code. We’re going to grab the code for our web page.

Your code is now ready to copy and paste into your web page.

Enter it in your web page, or use the Blogger add tool if you use Blogger and voila! Your widget will appear on your page.

Twitter allows you to easily create a widget for your website that shows your latest favorite tweets. This guide will show you how to “favorite” a tweet and how to customize the widget for your website.

How to “Favorite” a Tweet

Yes, favorite is now a verb and for Twitter, you can “favorite” or bookmark some of the tweets you like best or want to refer to later. It’s easy to make a tweet one of your favorites. All you do is go to your timeline.

When you see a tweet you want to “favorite”, place your mouse over it and you will see some options appear:

If you click “Favorite”, the start will now be yellow and will become one of your favorite tweets.

As you can see above, you can remove the tweet from your favorites anytime by clicking “unfavorite”.

Once you have some favorite tweets, you are ready to use the Faves Widget on your website. You can add favorites anytime and the widget will continue to update.

Creating & Customizing Your Faves Widget

Navigate to: http://business.twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_faves

And you’ll be immediately taken to the “Settings Page”.

Settings

On this page, you can specify the Twitter user. You can actually display the favorites of any account, as long as it’s not a private account.

 As you can see above, you can specify the username, a title for your widget and a caption. You can see a preview of how this will look when you look at the left side of the screen. We are showing that preview below. This is the default color, but don’t worry, you can edit the colors a little later on.

Preferences

Now you can click “Preferences” on the left menu and you’ll see a few options:

Let’s talk about these preference options mean…

• Poll for New Results: Tweets will appear in real time if this is checked. Otherwise, static tweets will appear.

• Include Scrollbar: This will include a scrollbar in the widget if checked.

• Behavior: This section allows you to choose between “Timed interval” or “Load all tweets” and decide how many tweets to be shown in the widget. “Timed interval” means that new tweets will be shown up to the maximum at an interval you specify. “Load all tweets” means all the tweets will be loaded to the maximum, without any time interval.

• Show Avatars: Choose this if you want the users’ avatars to appear beside each tweet.

• Show Timestamps: Choose this if you want the timestamp to appear for each tweet.

• Show Hashtags: Choose this if you want any hashtags in the tweets to appear. They will be clickable in the widget.

Appearance

Next, you’ll have the option to change the colors on your widget. You can match your website, come up with your own color scheme or whatever you wish. Simply click the color box and you can select a color using the easy color-selecting tool. Click “Done” when you’ve chosen the colors you want.

You can customize the background and text in the “shell”, which is the outer-edges of the widget. You can also specify the background and text of your actual tweets. And finally, you can specify the color of hyperlinks in the widget.

Dimensions

The final customization you can make to the widget are its dimensions. You can either a specify a height and width or you can choose “auto width” which will automatically resize the widget, according to the space provided and the height required to display the tweets.

Test Settings & Grab Code

Once you’ve adjusted all your settings, you can go to the bottom of the page and test the settings or grab the code. We’re going to grab the code for our web page.

Once we click “Finish & Grab Code” our code appears.

You can now copy and paste the code into your website. If you happen to use Blogger, you can use the handy Blogger tool to insert your widget. Here’s what our widget looks like:

Twitter makes it easy for you to share your tweets on Facebook too. This guide shows you how to set up and customize your application.

To get started, navigate to: CLICK HERE 

Install Application

To activate the application, you need to start by installing it. Click “Install” as shown below:

Facebook will automatically open in a new window and you have to give the Twitter application permission to access your account. Click “Allow” to continue the process.

Next, you’ll be asked if you want to connect your Twitter and Facebook account. Click “Allow” to proceed.

Connect to Profile & Pages

You can connect your Twitter updates to your profile and any Facebook Pages you have set up. You can also transfer your avatar from one account to the other, if you’d like.  We are going to connect Twitter to our Facebook Page in the example below.

We have clicked our Facebook Page and now, once again, have to give permission for Twitter to post to our Page. Click “Allow” to continue.

How it Looks

We go to Twitter and write our tweet. It appears in the timeline:

And the tweet will then appear on Facebook, with the note that it came “via Twitter” as shown below:

Make it easy for people to share your content on Twitter. You can create a “Tweet This” button for any page of your website and this guide will show you how to do it.

To get started, navigate to: http://business.twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton

Choose Your Button and Customize

The first thing to do is choose your button. You can choose buttons with a count of tweets or no count, if you prefer.

Now you can customize the text of the tweet, by clicking “Tweet text”. You can have the button pick up the title of the page or you can enter your own custom text. We’ve chosen some custom text.

 Once you have decided on your tweet text, enter the URL of the page you want people to tweet about. You can have the widget pick up the URL from the page you place the code on OR if you want people to tweet another page, specify the URL below.

Finally, you can choose your language. The default is English, so you only need to customize this if you are using another language. Choosing a language will modify the language that appears on the tweet button.

Recommend People to Follow

You can also optionally include up to two Twitter users in the tweet. Their username will appear as @username in the tweet.

Preview & Get Code

You can preview what your button will look like at the bottom of the button creation page. Here’s a preview of our button:

You can also click it to preview the resulting tweet:

And finally, you can grab the code for your website: