With less than two months before the start of 2012, have you began to create your goals and set up procedures for the new year?

There are a few things I would like share with you:

Most individuals have more than one email account for their business or for their personal emails.  Do you know that you can have all of your email accounts forwarded to your gmail account, which will allow you to create filters color code your emails, have them labeled and sent to specific folders.  You can also have different signatures for each email account.  One login and one password.  Makes life so much easier.

Do you have the desire to send out a monthly newsletter.  Constant contact grants you the ability to create email campaigns, set up auto-responders, opt-in forms for facebook and your website, several mailing list, survey and event tracking feature which can be linked to paypal.  If you are not using constant contact, you need to try them out now.  60 days free.  Sign up here.

Are you keeping all your files on the hard drive?  Do you have an assistant that you have to keep sending files via email?  Drop Box grants the opportunity to share files with several people and keeps the most current file in the drop box folder.  You can sign up for their free version which gives you 2GB of space.  Sign up here

Is it essential to back up?   YES!!!!

From experience I have learnt the hard way.  At the end of each day I use to say to myself, oh I need to back up but I would convince myself that I just purchased a new computer so I am ok for now?  Oh how wrong I was.  Within six months of purchasing my new laptop, my hard drive died.  I was devastated.  What was I going to do since all of my personal files and business files were on my computer?  Luckily for me, I was able to plug in my external CD Rom and copy all the files.  Lesson learnt.

Today with technology, there are so many programs and systems to make our lives much easier with backing up and it is also very essential as you can lose revenue just by losing your client files.  Your business can be affected in such a way that it takes very long to recover or you may have lost so much that your business never recover.  Is it worth it?  No!!!  There are three programs that are very easy to use that I would like to recommend.

1. Carbonite:  Carbonite is an online back company that is very reasonable.  For $50 a year, they will copy all your files from your computer to their server and then back up nightly.  The initial file transfer may take a while depending on the size of your files.  You can subscribe to carbonite by selecting one of their two packages.

2. Backup Creator – Backup Creator is fairly new but it is so easy to use.  If you are currently using wordpress for your website then this plugin is the way to go to ensure that your website is backed up.  Not only will the shell of your website be backed up, but all of your plugins, databases, widgets everything.  Maybe you are a web designer who has client’s occasionally request to have their website moved to another hosting company. With backup creator you can go to the new wordpress site and upload the backup plugin for the old site and if you preview the site, you will have the exact layout design and widgets as your previous site.  Here is the link for Backup creator .

3.  Drop Box – Transferring files to drop is also another simple way to back up a few files depending on your subscription.  Drop box allows you to transfer files from computer to your clients or to anyone without having to send them via email.  The beauty about drop box is that once you update your files in your drop box folder on your computer, it automatically backups the file in your drop box account.  Here is the link for drop box.

Having learnt the hard way, I now use the following to ensure that all my files are backed up and you can too.