Every day, more & more people discover that Twitter is a great tool to drive traffic to your site, build new business, and to help retain existing customers.

But what entrepreneur has the time to “Tweet” all the time, on top of everything else?

Here at webgroupWest, we recently started using a new technology that automatically Tweets when there’s new content on the site, and can even automatically Tweet when there’s interesting information from elsewhere on the web, which we feel will be of interest to our clients.

It’s pretty cool stuff.

If you’d like to learn more about automatic Tweets to support your business, just contact us (and of course, you can always follow us on Twitter).

Over the years, I’ve managed to migrate all of our our operations to “the cloud,”  using web-based applications, as opposed to their desktop elders.

As I’ve written before (and preached to our clients), the benefits are numerous… No more having to maintain hardware and networks, instant sharing and collaboration with team members without needing an infrastructure, and so-forth.

One of the last hurdles (for me) was getting the ease-of-use I wanted, being able to work with what I need to work with, without having everything running as tabs in my browser.

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I’ve been a big fan of Google Voice since… Well, since before it was even Google Voice.

In fact, I’ve been using it since it was first launched as GrandCentral.

If you’re not familiar with Google Voice, it simply gives you a (new) phone number (for free), and let’s you forward it to another phone (or, phones).

Why is that so cool?

Here’s where the magic begins… You can have a separate number for your business, for example, and have it ring both your home and cell numbers. If nobody answers either, the caller will go to a separate (Google Voice) voicemail, which you can customize for your business.

And I’m just beginning to scratch the surface. You can set Google Voice to not ring certain phones at certain times, have it screen your calls… Oh, and you can have it email you a transcript of missed calls.

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When does “a penny saved” become “a buck & a half lost?”

I was scanning some local classifieds the other day, and came across an ad from someone looking for some pretty solid web development skills for a “simple project.”

The ad clearly stated that he would pay exactly $10/hr., because everyone who works for him “makes $10/hr. NO EXCEPTIONS!”

Seeing that made me chuckle, and recall a story from a few years ago, when someone asked me to do a “simple project” for $10/hr.

I (naturally) declined, thinking to myself that was less than my Dad paid me to mow the lawn when I was a kid, and that was longer ago than I’d care to remember.

Some time later, I ran into the guy again, and asked him how it worked-out. He said, “Well, it doesn’t look as good as your samples, and there are some bugs, but at least I didn’t have to pay a king’s ransom.”

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