Freelance


Vangie Beal, Freelance Writer

Daily: Find me on Webopedia.com
Frequently: Find me on Ecommerce-Guide.com
Every Friday: A new tech article on Webopedia.com
Sometimes on: InstantMessagingPlanet.com, PracticallyNetworked.com, SmallBusinessComputing, LinuxToday.com
Every Wednesday : eBay/online selling on Ecommerce-Guide.com
My Blogs: Nova Scotia Girl, Canada Contests – Daily Entry
 
Below is a small sample of some articles, interviews, and reviews I have written for different online Web media publications.
 
2009

CheapTweet Gives Twittering Retailers more Exposure
While CheapTweet offers deals from all retailers—big and small­—the service can be especially useful to smaller retailers and individual online sellers, who have a small Twitter following.

Expert Tips for a Tweeting Business
It’s easy enough to use Twitter, but businesses have to use social media marketing in the same way they use any form of marketing — with a business plan and knowledge — to be successful.

Page Mage Lets Sellers Get Creative with eBay Listings
Page Mage, which is a Flash-based Web service, also lets sellers embed video, image galleries and animated text to their auction or fixed-price item listings.

Three Facebook Apps for EBay Sellers
We look at three eBay applications that you can add to your own profile to promote your eBay business on the Facebook platform.

JumpGauge Lets Consumers Interact with Labels
From soup can labels to Web site badges, labeling has been a large part of product recognition and brand loyalty.

Socialcast Adds to Expanding Field of Enterprise Social Networking
One platform available to the enterprise is Socialcast—a secure real-time communications tool that puts the best features of consumer social networking and communication tools into a secure enterprise package that meets enterprise archiving needs.

E-com Report: The 8th Annual Merchant Survey
Optimization is the new buzzword according to the E-tailing Group’s Eighth Annual Merchant Survey, which provides responses from 190 merchants in the first quarter of 2009. The survey addresses trends in strategy, merchandising and marketing online.

Yammer Asks, “What Are You Working On?”
Where some believe Twitter falls short is in the business and enterprise world–right where Yammer.com is targeting its own micro-blogging messaging service.

What Is Rogue Anti-virus Software?
Also called scareware, or rogue security software, or smitfraud, this type of software is also most commonly defined as malware—it is designed specifically to damage or disrupt your computer system.

Cool Twitter Tools for Better Tweeting
To help you sort out the best options for tweaking your Tweeter tactics, we take a look at several cool and useful Twitter tools including URL shrinks, Twitter clients and Twitter Web widgets to get you started.

Three Ways to Make Money on Facebook
Using Facebook to sell your wares is a fairly new trend, but with more than 1,900,000 users accessing the Facebook Marketplace application it is obviously a trend that is catching on in a big way.

SEO Tips for New Web-Shop Owners
Earlier this month we profiled eBay seller Kasey Baxter, who recently launched his first off-eBay shop. In launching a new retail site, Baxter felt that he needed search engine optimization (SEO) to boost traffic to the site, but he didn’t know where to start.

Facebook How-To Guide: Create Business Pages and Ad Campaigns
Leveraging Facebook business options can provide a new channel for your customers to interact, and at the same time help you acquire new customers as your Facebook fans spread the word about your business to their friends.

Handy Keyboard Browser Shortcuts
Redundant point-and-click actions can slow you down. These keyboard shortcuts save time and help you get exactly where you want to be in seconds in Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Chrome.

Chat With Your Visitors Using AIM’s Wimzi
AIM WIMZI is a free Web widget—a small application that you can easily add to a blog, Web page or social networking profile so visitors on your page can chat with you. In this review we’ll show you how to customize the AIM Wimzi widget and also provide a step-by-step guide to embedding Wimzi on your own page.

Expert Tips for a Tweeting Business
It’s easy enough to use Twitter, but businesses have to use social media marketing in the same way they use any form of marketing — with a business plan and knowledge — to be successful.

Small Biz Tips: How to Start E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing offers one of the best advertising returns for any business, according to research by the Direct Marketing Association. In 2008, e-mail marketing returned $45.06 for every dollar spent on it—but industry experts say that small businesses are slow to adopt e-mail marketing practices.

How to Use Twitter as an Online Marketing Tool
Like b-blogs (that’s business blogs) and social networking profiles, sites such as Twitter offer businesses a new way to market products, promote sales and boost revenue — if you tweet right, that is.

Shopify Buys into Power of PowerReviews
PoweReviews, a provider of customer review and social commerce solutions, announced that it is partnering with Shopify to provide easy access to PowerReviews Express to Shopify’s more than 5,000 online retailers.

E-Commerce Profile: PillowDecor.com
Even in a recession pillows still sell. People wanting to make a change in decor without the expense of buying new furniture will often look to accessories like pillows — add in the fact that pillows are usually replaced every two to five years — and you have a niche, recession-proof product.

IMshopping Adds a Social Touch to Online Stores
IMshopping is a service that aims to bring a human touch to online shopping.

 
2008

To Boldly Go Where No Mouse Has Gone Before
In today’s mobile computing world, one thing that you may not always have handy is a good, clean mousing surface. When sitting on a crowded train or sprawled out on your living room floor with your notebook, it can be at best a headache and at worst a moment of near panic when you can’t find a good place to use your mouse.

Kijiji Review: Better than eBay for Hot Rods and Guitars
Our eBay columnist tries the auction site’s local classifieds Kijiji and recommends it for low-profit merchandise and hard-to-ship items.

Tips to Fix a Slow Running Computer
There are many reasons why your computer could be running slowly, but here are some easy steps you can take to figure out what is causing the slow down.”

Five Windows Vista Tips for Networking and File Sharing
One of the hardest thing about using Vista is figuring out how to get to the settings and network configuration areas. Here are five tips that will help you maneuver through the networking options in Vista.

Start 2008 with Five E-Commerce Freebies
Want to fine-tune your e-biz without blowing your holiday bucks? We provide five free online sales tools covering accounting, e-mail marketing, widgets and more.

Five Free Blog Tools Save Time, Spur Sales
Blogs are a great way to expand your e-store marketing efforts, but they can take a lot of time to maintain. We provide five tools to help you maximize your efforts.

Understanding Router Settings
A list of many common broadband wired and wireless router settings and a description of what function it performs.

EBay Watch 2008: The Year in Review
There is no doubt that 2008 will go down as eBay’s most controversial yet. The auction giant rolled out one policy change after another — changes that drive eBay’s focus on attracting bigger retailers.

Targeted E-Mail Marketing with CampaignerPro
In addition to letting you launch more specific and targeted campaigns, CampaignerPro 2.0 Workflows also lets you program automated e-mails with quick drag-and-drop tools that create a flowchart for visualizing and mapping out each element of the campaign.

Set Up Online Payment Processing in Four Steps
To help new merchants, FormSpring offers a pre-built order form template that can be edited to meet the specific needs of each small business.

 2007

Ten Free Tools: Welcome to the World Wide Widget Web
Searching for widgets that can help you run your online business or eBay auctions takes more time than setting them up, so we did it for you.

Widgetmania: What’s In It For You
If you’re still not quite sure what all the buzz is about, we explain the basics of widgets, and how they can help your e-biz.

Six Hot Shots in Next-Gen Search, Social Shopping
New shopping sites focused on social commerce and specialized search are sprouting up – and succeeding. We show you how to get listed in a few clicks.

Newsletter Notes: Catch and Release Tips for E-Mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is an affordable way to turn browsers into buyers.

LCD Versus Plasma
If you’re looking a flat-screen TV this holiday season one question, other than price, that plagues consumers is which is better, LCD or Plasma?

“Did You Know… All About Widgets”
The word widget (pronounced wih-jit) is one of those words that now has far too many definitions. The dictionary defines it as a small mechanical device; a gadget, or a manufactured item that is unnamed. But we all know in the Internet era, a widget is much, much more.

Webopedia’s “Did You Know… Metadata: Data About Data”
Learn what Information you might unknowingly be disclosing with your files

PracticallyNetworked: Getting Your System Ready for Windows Vista
If you plan to throw caution to the wind and upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista, here are some things you need to first consider.

Small Business Computing: Wipe, Don’t Reformat, Your Old Hard Drives
The fact that reformatting a hard drive doesn’t completely erase the data stored on it is both a blessing and a curse depending on your circumstances.

Ecommerce-Guide: Web Gems: Ten Free Tools for E-tailer
In this roundup you’ll find a overview of the features and licensing information for 10 Web site helpers that we downloaded, tried and recommend for small Web shop owners.

2006

Ecommerce-Guide: Chatting Your Way to Success with Live Support
Live support is all about connecting Internet businesses with their Web customers by using a one-on-one, real-time communication tool.

Ecommerce-Guide: Google Checkout Open, Ready for Business
Following much speculation surrounding Google’s planned launch of a payment system to rival PayPal, the search-engine giant today announced that its Google Checkout is open for business.

Ecommerce-Guide: New Service Promises the Best Shipping Price
RedRoller is free, and the company charges no upfront costs or monthly fees for you to view the side-by-side comparisons of major national and regional carriers.

Webopedia’s “Did You Know… The Differences Between Hubs, Switches and Routers”
Ever wonder what the difference is among these boxes?

Webopedia’s “Did You Know… Perpendicular Hard Drive Recording Technology”
As manufacturers reached the limits of hard drive capacity, consumer demand for even higher capacity drives did not diminish.

Ecommerce-Guide: Fee Free: Three New eBay Management Packages
To help sellers better manage all aspects of their eBay business, several all-in-one auction applications are available that help with both listings and seller management issues.

Small Business Computing:  Google Spreads it On
While Google Spreadsheets is certainly no ‘Excel killer’, it does provide an easy way to create, import, export and share your spreadsheets online.

Small Business Computing: Google Maps: A Primer for Small Business
We’re sure you’re already familiar with the Google name in terms of its search engine, but there is a whole lot more to Google than just searching.

Ecommerce-Guide: New Products Claim to Make SEM and SEO Easier
Small e-commerce-based businesses need to consider investing in optimizing their Web site for organic (i.e., free) search engine rankings, as well as backing it with a successful search engine marketing plan (i.e.,paid listings).

Small Business Computing: Web 2.0 Translates to Free Hosted Office Apps
While Web 2.0 has had its day of being just marketing jargon, small businesses are finally starting to see something concrete come packaged under the popular catch-phrase.

SharkyExtreme.com: Interview with Seagate’s Joni Clark
SharkyExtreme.com: Industry Interview with Joni Clark,Seagate Technology’s PC/Mobile Product Marketing Manager.

More Stuff…

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