Office 2010 Released

It’s out. It’s nice. If you’re using Office 2003 or earlier, it’s time to upgrade.

Office 2010 uses the same kind of ribbons that Office 2007 users have grown accustomed to. The new “ribbon” that you’ll find in Word 2010 is the one that 2007 should have had. It’s called file. The file ribbon gives you all the options and information about the particular file that you’re working on that you could possibly want to know.

For example, as I type this blog entry in Word 2010, when I click the file tab, I have lots of nifty choices like Open, Save, Save as, and Print but the option that is highlighted is Info. Under Info I can Set Permissions (protect the document so that only those who should see it can), Prepare for Sharing (basically let’s me easily strip hidden information that other’s shouldn’t see but that is useful to have for an in house document) and work with different Versions of the document.

I can also see useful information such as how long I’ve been editing this document, add or view the Title and any Tags, see who the creator is, and lots of other information. It is also from the file tab that I can open recent or other documents and do many of the tasks from the old File menu.

As is usually the case, the biggest change comes with Outlook. As the way people communicate continues to change, Microsoft tries to make Outlook the tool to help you do this. Outlook now has its own ribbons (for some reason Outlook 2007 didn’t get the ribbon makeover).

The newest feature here is the Quick Steps box. Basically what this box does is let you create macros or rules on what do with certain messages. Once that rule is created, you can run it by clicking the appropriate button in the Quick Steps box. I’m still experimenting with this but this feature holds potential in helping to tame the email beast.

Access has some nice new features, one that we’re taking a very close look at right now is the Project template. What is nice is that Access is now really designed from the get go to be interactive. I opened the Project template and the first thing I had to do was create a user (myself) and then log in. Then I was off to the races creating and entering information on the project.

The downside is I wanted to watch the video which required SilverLight which I had already installed which Access didn’t recognize as being installed. Still a few issues, it would appear but all in all I like this latest version and could see moving some of our folks to it even before the first service pack.

Other tools that come with the complete version of Office 2010 include OneNote (great for taking quick notes or for having a notebook on a particular task or subject) and InfoPath – the tool for forms – now comes with a Designer part and a Filler part. For business users (those with lots of computers and users), there’s also a new program called SharePoint Workspace. I’m still investigating these but they look to be pretty nifty tools for improved work flow.

The full version “Professional” retails for around $500 but as a productivity tool is well worth it.

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Easy Listening

Recently I was reminded of the wonderful effects listening to classical music can have on your brain – helping you to think better.

So instead of focusing on the business of web site design, I thought I’d share this tip with you. One of the ways I have found to listen to classical is through Pandora. Simply visit www.pandora.com on your computer or even your smartphone.

You can create a channel or multiple channels. The channel I’ve been tuning in to today is Symphonic, Classical.

Creating a channel. Sounds difficult doesn’t it? Actually its incredibly simple. After the 60 second process to create an account (create a password tied to your email address), you simply type in a genre, artist or song.

That’s it.

I’ve got four channels tied to my account. One is classical and the others are more classic rock oriented. I’ve created a channel based around Bob Seger and another based on the Kiss song “Beth”. But Pandora is pretty cool because just like science has mapped out the human genome, Pandora is mapping out the music genome. They have real people listening to songs and collecting close to 400 different attributes about the music.

So when I listen to my own personal Bob Seger station, I don’t just hear Bob Seger, I hear songs related to the kind of music he plays. For example, I just heard Tom Petty playing Breakdown followed by Eric Clapton and Wonderful Tonight. Whether on my phone or on the computer I can rate the songs (either up or down) and get more information about the particular artist and song.

It’s easy to get started and then you can control how “in to it” you get. It’s free for something like 40 hours a month and after that it’s only $36 / year for unlimited listening and no ads.

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Web Site Design Fundamentals

Would you build the foundation for your house and then begin to ponder what rooms you should put in the house and where the walls should go?

Of course not.

Yet when it comes to building a web site this is precisely the model that most businesses follow. First they build the site and they begin to think about Internet marketing. “What should we try to accomplish?” “Should we do a search campaign?” “What should the call to action be on this page?” All of these questions are best answered BEFORE you design your site.

You don’t want to have brick walls if you’re planning on stucco. Before you start you need to determine what your goals are for your site. These can be marketing goals – “We want to generate 25 new leads a month through the site” or they can be customer-relationship goals “We want customers to be able to download their portfolio without needing to call us” or a myriad of others. The important thing is to understand the goals as you begin to design the site.
Recently I met with a business owner who thought she had nearly completed her complex membership site. She wanted my help with “the last little piece” of managing the logins. What she had, in fact, was very much like the old western movie sets. Walk down main street and you think you’re really in the old west. Then you open a door to look inside and instead you just see the desert stretching off into the distance.

Facade – What’s behind your web site?

She had cobbled together a few pieces that really looked enticing but there was no backend to manage the processes that she wanted. While that is an extreme case of not having a firm foundation, we see again and again how the design and development of a site do not support the goals of the site owner.

Once you have your goals established, you can then envision how they will be attained through the site and this will lead to a site that actually helps your business grow.

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Be Findable! The Small Business Guide To Location Social Media

EduCyber Presents Growing Your Business on the Internet Series:

Thursday, May 27, 2010
“Be Findable! The Small Business Guide To Location Social Media”

Pay online to reserve your spot >>
Where are you?

That’s not a metaphysical question. Are you and your business findable? Are you being found?

Way back in 2007 Google told us that 73% of online searches were for local goods and services. Sure, you can find out a plumber in South Africa, if you want to. But most folks want to find a local business if they want a plumber, a restaurant, a realtor or even a web designer.

There are many sites that have been created or have adapted themselves to accommodate this need for local search. EduCyber has spent many hours exploring this phenomenon and we will share our findings in a seminar on May 27 from 11:30 to 1:00.

What will you get from this seminar?

Concrete steps you can take to enhance your local presence on the internet.
How to: a) Create local accounts at Google and Bing b) Keep those accounts fresh (and at the top)
Wisdom to make decisions about whether and how to engage in Yelp, FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, BrightKite and other location-based social networking sites.
Your business website will get noticed by more potential customers!

Who should come to this seminar?

Local destination businesses: Restaurants, retail stores, specialty shops, gyms, etc.
Local service businesses: Printers, CPAs, financial advisers, business consultants, etc.
Local tradespeople: Plumbers, Electricians, HVAC, Lawn care, trash removal, etc.

Location: 4251 Kipling St.
(2nd Floor Conference Room)
Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Cost: $19.95 (includes a light lunch)

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Eliminate Orphans

Some of you will think this is some sort of Dickensian entreaty to eliminate “the surplus population”. But it isn’t.

I’m talking about orphaned web pages. A web page gets orphaned in much the same way a human does. It’s parent dies or goes away.

Let me give an anecdote to explain both how it happens and why its bad. I recently met a very well known financial advisor in the Denver area. We arranged to meet at one of my favorite restaurants for some adult beverages. I got the time wrong and showed up a half an hour early.

So I googled his name so I could give him a call. The first page that came up was from his web site. So, having a few minutes, I started clicking around and thought to myself “This guy needs our service – his web site is WAAAY out of date.”

Once he arrived, I showed him the page and he said “That’s from our old site.” When I clicked on the Home link I could see the new site but all of the old site was still out there and still active. All of these pages were orphaned. They weren’t really supposed to be there.

The obvious solution to this problem is to delete the pages. Right?

Ahh, you were paying attention, good for you. The number 1 Google Ranking for his name was the orphaned page. Delete that and you lose visibility.

There are two steps that should be taken to make sure you get rid of orphaned pages but don’t lose the Search Engine Optimization power that page or those pages have attained.

Create a 301 redirect so that links to the old page will be forwarded to the new page or the appropriate replacement for the old page. There are different ways to implement a 301 redirect. The best way is to edit the .htaccess file but many web control panels will let you accomplish this through a control panel.
Then it is safe to delete the old page.

In case it’s still not clear, let me give you one more example. We recently redesigned the West Chamber Serving Jefferson County web site. Before the redesign there was a Google link to the Youth Leadership Jefferson County that was http://www.westchamber.org/lead-yljc.asp. After the redesign, that page no longer exists but if you try to visit that page, you end up at http://www.westchamber.org/lead-yljc-asp/ which is the correct link.

I just discovered an orphan on our own web site today. That now has a proper 301 redirect so folks don’t get lost or confused. Need help with this? Give us a call at 303 268-2245.

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Should You Quit?

What do you need to quit?

Since I finished reading Seth Godin’s “The Dip” this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about quitting. No, I’m not quitting my business – I love what I do, but I am thinking about what tactics I’m using in business that aren’t working and determining how and what to quit.

Sounds easy right?

Think again.

It was easy for me to tell a customer not to spend time and money redesigning his site but instead to spend that same amount of time writing blogs for his site. He wants to increase visitors and getting good content out there via his blog is the best way.

But the hard part is determining what is working. I’m considering joining a new networking group. One person I spoke with said in nine years that he never got a customer from the group. But in this, his 10th year, he got two and for his line of business, that is an excellent ROI.

I’ve had a similar experience, participating for years in a group before my investment pays off. So how do you know what to quit and when? How do you know when to stay, to gut it out through the dip because the reward is so great?

Seriously. How do you know?

Share your thoughts.

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Internet Marketing Through Web Site Design

Lots of folks start their web design with a logo and maybe some colors. Then they add some copy that seems appropriate and figure out how to navigate through the site and they’re done with the design.

After they’ve finished, they’re ready for Internet marketing – maybe they’ll add a search engine optimization campaign or a paid search campaign (like Google AdWords). The more internet savvy ones will even develop a social media marketing campaign.

But the design and the marketing aren’t planned out together.

That’s a mistake.

Build your web site on a firm foundation

You have to start with a firm foundation. What better foundation for a web site design that your marketing goals? Start with the result in mind and you’ll build a solid site that not only complements your business but actually drives it forward.

Three Questions to consider as you build your foundation:

What is the main call to action throughout the site?
How do the various pages flow or drive the visitor towards the call to action?
How can I forget about the features and focus on the benefits (which is what the customer really wants anyway)?

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Recovering From Poor Internet Marketing

I have a friend who lies paralyzed in a hospital bed. A short while back he was involved in an accident and he will never walk again. I stopped by to visit him today. He was sedated but the good news is he has a tracheotomy. That never before sounded like a good thing but for him it is allowing him to breathe without having a tube shoved down his throat. It keeps other bacteria from following that tube right down into his lungs, and it is, the doctors believe, a step towards getting him to breathe on his own again. In short, for my friend, having a hole in his throat is a step towards recovery.

What does that have to do with Internet marketing? Last week I spoke with a client who is running his own AdWords campaign and is quite frustrated because “every time I turn it on it costs me $530 every two weeks” but he’s not getting a return on his investment.

Here’s what I told him he should do:

Have us do an audit of his AdWords campaign. Since he’s not an expert and since he has a business to run, he doesn’t know all the ins and outs of a paid search campaign such as how to set it up for long tail search or whether it actually makes sense to have a different campaign for each city he’d like to get business from.
Have us do a local search campaign for his business. With the tools provided through Google Local Business Center and Bing Local Search, as well as sites like Yelp, CitySearch, BrightKite, and Gowalla, there are many things a geographically based company can capitalize on. But it has to be done well and consistently.

While he’s still thinking it over, I’d like to tell you why he should choose one or the both of these. Until now he’s been paralyzed with the urge to stop throwing money away. By choosing either or both of these solutions he’ll be taking a step towards recovery.

And yes we would appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my friend has he faces a long road to recovery ahead but he is making steps, small though they may seem, towards getting better.

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Why Internet Marketing Works

While I’ve never been much of a numbers guy, I’m amazed about how easy Internet Marketing is because absolutely everything can be measured. So your goal is to figure out what to measure and then measure it.

And the beauty of it is that small changes can reap LARGE effects. Let’s say that you have a paid search campaign. You want people to rent a tuxedo from your store instead of your competitors. You can set up a paid search campaign – such as Google AdWords – to drive traffic to you site. At Google you identify when your ad will appear based on search words. So you say I want the ad to appear when people search for “prom”, “wedding”, “tux”, or “tuxedo”. Easy enough.

Not let’s say you start running this campaign and you find that for every 100 clicks (and you pay for every click) you get three tuxedo rentals. To make this a profitable venture for you, you determine that you need at least 5 rentals for every 100 clicks but you’d much prefer 10 or more.

Now that you have the traffic coming, you need to look at why more folks aren’t converting. With some of the nifty tools Google provides, you can do split testing. So you look at your landing page (the one you direct folks to from Google) and decide to keep the existing page as one version of the test. Then you make a small change – perhaps a differently worded call to action – and set that page as the second version of the test.

Next you turn on the test and then as people click through to your site, you can calculate which call to action is getting more business. Once you’ve got enough data to determine which is better, eliminate the underperformer and use the better one. If you change your conversion rate from 1% of visitors converting to customers to 2%, you’ve doubled your business. Pretty good ROI!

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

But don’t stop there. Like my shampoo bottle says, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” If you’ve found that one call to action gets more conversions, what if there is yet another that will triple your conversions? Build another page to test. And often its not the call to action. It could be the image you use or the attention getting headline or the copy leading up to the call to action.

Since you can measure each step of the process, you can measure your ROI at every step and set yourself apart from your competition.

And that is just with Paid Search. The same holds true with Organic Search and even Social Media Marketing.

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Building Better Web Sites

We often have people come to us looking for a web site and they start off with, “Here’s the content and here’s the logo.” That would be like starting off your home construction with interior design and where the furniture is going to be.

To design a good web site, you need to start with a good foundation. What is your goal? Be SPECIFIC. Being specific means going much deeper than “I want more business.” Being specific means thinking about how many new customers you’d like / can handle each week or month or quarter. Being specific means thinking about how your web site goals fit in with your overall marketing goals.

By being specific in your goal setting, you can then begin to build your foundation. If your specific goal is to get 15 calls a week via your web site (which you will then turn at least one into a customer) then you can look at your site plans and answer the very specific question, “What am I doing to entice or encourage the visitor to give me a call?”

There are many many ways to accomplish this but with that question in mind, you can begin to craft the site or a particular page in such a way that you’re helping the visitor to reach the conclusion that they should indeed give you a call. And don’t forget the obvious. The same week we put our phone number in the banner of our site, I closed a deal where the customer expressed thanks that we were so easy to get in touch with by having the number at the top.

But having your number at the top of the page is NOT a call to action. A call to action would be much more like “Have a pressing tax question? Call one of our advisors for a free 15 minute consultation” or “Call to schedule your consultation and we’ll give you a free _______ when you come in.” The blank could be a blender, USB drive, book, domain name or any other appropriate gift for your business.

So even if you’re not a web designer, you can still build a better web site.

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Office 2010 Released

Easy Listening

Web Site Design Fundamentals

Facade – What’s behind your web site?

Eliminate Orphans

Should You Quit?

Building Better Web Sites

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