BryanPovlinski.com

We’re getting read to send out our wedding invitations within the next month.  We have a few of the addresses that we need, but most of them we’ll need to get from our guests via phone or email.

We’ll be putting the addresses into a spreadsheet so we have everything in one place.  So I decided to simply link a Google Spreadsheet to the email so that everyone could input their information directly into the spreadsheet.  This eliminates all of the copy and pasting we would have to do maually.  Now when our friends get our email they can open the spreadsheet and follow the format that’s already set up for name and address.

Here’s how to set this up:

1. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs and type in your column headings based on the information you want to gather

2. Save the spreadsheet with a unique ame

3. Click on “Share” in the top right, and then check the boxes for “Allow all others to view” and “Also allow them to edit.”  Now you can copy and paste that link into an email or anywhere you’d like to share it with your friends.  All the data that is entered will be updated automatically.

I laughed pretty hard at this one…his reaction is priceless

I’ve been using Bit.ly as the default URL shortener on Twitter for quite a while now.  However, I never really realized all the analytics features it has until using it with a SurveyMonkey link yesterday.  As we were working on a project for Indy Reads I sent out a survey to my network via Twitter, Facebook, and email.  I converted the link to a Bit.ly link so that it would be easy to place in an email, and also so that I could track the amount of clicks it received.  Here are the results I received:

Now I can see which medium was actually the most effective in driving traffic.  I was pretty impressed with the number of clicks it received in only a few hours, but I wasn’t quite sure whether it was because a lot of people were opening my emails or if was coming from my Twitter post.  After I reviewed the referral analytics I realized that the bulk of the traffic came through email.  This is useful information if I’m ever going to run any other similar surveys in the future.

The other thing that I really like about Bit.ly is that it’s integrated in the Shareaholic plug-in.  You can use Shareaholic on all the major browsers, and if you want to share any kind of content that you’re browsing online it’s a must.  Anytime I come across a resource on the web that I want to share on Twitter, email to a friend, or save to Delicious I simply hit the Shareaholic button.  Bit.ly is integrated as one of the services and it links directly with Twitter.  So when I’m browsing the web and find something to share I hit Shareaholic and choose Bit.ly as the service I’d like to use.  I can edit the Tweet in the window that pops up and the link and article title are automatically pre-populated.  Plus I still get all the analytics features built into Bit.ly.  This makes it easy to see what type of content I share gets the most hits.