The Lockwood Letter

Willie Crawford has come up with a way to quickly get top rankings in Google and other search engines, and it’s nothing like any SEO info you might have seen before.

This has nothing to with writing articles, begging for links, keyword density, or anything like that, and there’s nothing blackhat about it.

You can grab this right now for under $10: Get Top Rankings

If you don’t see the value in that, I don’t know what else to say.

I recently bought a new PC, and I didn’t feel like buying yet another copy of Microsoft Office, so I decided to try an alternative.

Sun has released an office suite comparable to Microsoft Office, but it’s free.

It’s called OpenOffice, and it includes programs similar to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access, plus a graphics program.

You can download it here.

Versions are available for Windows, Mac, or Linux. You can order a CD for a small fee if you’d rather not download the software.

I haven’t gone through it feature-by-feature, but it seems pretty comparable to Microsoft’s version. It can even use the same file formats, so you can work with your old Word, Excel, or Powerpoint files easily. One nice thing it has that Word lacks is the ability to save a document in PDF format, so if you go with OpenOffice, you won’t need to get Adobe Acrobat or another PDF creator.

For some reason, Sun left out an email program comparable to Outlook, so I went looking for that piece of the puzzle.

I found two free Outlook clones: Spicebird and Evolution. Both looked good and included features similar to Outlook for email, contacts, calendar, and so on.

Unlike OpenOffice, neither of the email programs works directly with Outlook data files (.pst), but both include an import feature. The catch is that Outlook has to be installed on your computer for the import to work.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, since if you have Outlook, why would you be looking for a clone of it?

One suggested way to get around this is to download a free trial of Outlook from Microsoft’s website and install it to do your import.

I tried that with both Spicebird and Evolution after moving my pst file over from my old computer, and even with Outlook on the new PC, neither program could correctly import my old email.

If you’re starting fresh, either of those would be a good alternative (I would go with Spicebird), but since I need to access my old Outlook data, I’m going to have to stick with Outlook (which I can buy separately once my trial ends in a few months).

If you know of another Outlook clone that can properly handle old Outlook data, please post a comment about it here.

I’ll post more in the future about free alternatives to expensive software.

One of the best things you can do for your business is to go to live events, and one of the best of those is coming up in late October in Atlanta.

I will be there, as I have twice a year since early 2005. It’s one I wouldn’t miss.

And you should be there, too… if you’re serious.

This is not a big pitchfest, but a real conference with people sharing information and networking. There will be a full day on listbuilding, as well as panel discussions on subjects like copywriting, developing the right mindset, creating products, membership sites, and several others.

This is unlike most live events in so many ways. You get the recordings at no extra charge. You get a home study course that you can begin immediately after signing up (no wait for shipping); you’ll want to refer back to that course again and again in years to come. You get to participate in twice-monthly teleconferences (for Q&A, not sales presentations). And that’s just the beginning.

I wanted to let you know about this now because the price is going up Oct 1. You still have time to get the best prices on travel arrangements.

Get all the details here

BTW, Atlanta is nice that time of year, and it’s a short drive if you’d like to go into the mountains before or after- the leaves will be at their peak fall colors.

If you plan on coming, let me know, and we can meet for lunch or dinner.