Email is probably one of the best things that happened to business. And I don’t mean the speed of communications and so on. Email makes pitching to new prospects dead easy. With email, you don’t have to cold call people any more. And you no longer have to worry about how you will get on during a live conversation, how you will react to your prospect’s questions etc.

Instead, you can take your time and craft your message and make it perfect for your recipient.

By its nature, email – and especially a cold call email – has to be short. These days no-one has the time to read through paragraphs of copy. In order for your message to be read, it has to be very concise, two paragraphs at most. Needless to say, that doesn’t leave much space for presenting yourself as an expert, right?

Luckily, you can use your email signature to help you achieve just that. Here are three tips on how to do it:

A friend of mine has alerted me to the new features that LinkedIn has recently introduced. And they seriously affect your privacy and your ability to prevent spam.

I didn’t receive anything from LinkedIn informing me about these changes but it appears the new settings are switched to ‘ON’ by default.

So you have to go and change them to ‘OFF’, otherwise LinkedIn will be able to use your name and photo in third party advertising.

Here are the four links where you can opt out. Simply uncheck the tick box.

Manage social advertising

Manage enhanced advertising

Fast broadband, mobile technologies and social media have completely changed the way freelancers work and communicate. We can (technically) work from any where with a laptop and wifi; we can collaborate with people on the other side of the world; we can use the web to create new income streams for ourselves.

But these digital technologies can result in a daily digital deluge leaving less time to get things done and less time to focus on our core work.

Here are five tools and tactics to help you harness the power of the web to stay focused, get more done, and work effectively.

1. Gmail Priority Inbox

One of my favourite finds last year was the new feature from Gmail, Priority Inbox which has helped my transformation into an email ninja.