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Stumbling On My Way to the Cloud

Feeling a bit stumped on my move to the cloud.  I was so looking forward to getting rid of Quickbooks for accounting, payroll and invoicing and using the cloud.  I would rid myself of the last locally stored information.  I would thumb my nose at Intuit and their annual charges.  My accounting package would talk with banks and credit cards.   But I’m not finding the whole solution.

Here is what I need.  I want to record time online and with my phone. I want my many (1) employees to do the same.  I want this time to go directly into my invoices which are sent via e-mail to clients. I then want this time to be used for payroll.  This is what happens now with Minute 7, Quickbooks and Quickbooks payroll.   I have to renew Quickbooks every year or two at about $300 and I have to pay Quickbooks for the payroll service each year at another $300.  I then have to do my own backups and Minute 7 costs me about $8 per month.

I am finding some very cool pieces with the online programs.  I find Freshbooks and Harvest which seem to do a great job with time tracking and creating invoices.  They go beyond and
So with what I found so far,  Freshbooks looks like it would cost me more than my whole current setup.  I  would need to do another payroll system and transfer information to it and back.  I can see it happening in the near future but for now I will keep my locally installed accounting package and keep an eye on these other companies.do a great job of collecting payments and with Harvest, tracking projects.  Neither are accounting systems but they can intergrate with some systems such as Xero, Outright and Wave.  These accounting systems do not do payroll. Only Wave seems to have a plan for doing payroll.

 

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Rules for Creating a Business Home Page

Focus on Your Marketing Plan – What, you don’t have a marketing plan in a binder? Not to worry. Write down or at least mentally focus on who you want to reach, what do you want to tell them. Keep this in mind as you build your home page.

Give the Details – This is your entry in the new phone book.   How do they reach you?   How would they do business with you?

Create Obvious Calls to Action – If you want someone to sign up, call or visit you, then make these obvious choices on your page.

Keep it Simple – In print they call it white space.  You need to have a crisp clear home page that is not cluttered.

Proof Read It – Nothing says bush league like grammar and spelling issues on your website.

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Why You Need a Website

Here are a few of the reasons why you need that small business website.

Build Presence – Customers need to know that you are real. You have taken the time to build a real business.  Once upon a time that would mean they would need to see your business location.  Now they need to see that you have taken the time to build a business website.

Control Searches  – Without your own site your business will still likely show up on Google but the information will be from other places. You need to define your business and get your information into the search space.

Become Visible – Many people will not use a phone book, business directory or other means to find a business. They will look you up on the web and if you do not have  spot, you are invisible.

So what are you waiting for?

 

 

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Using an Editorial Calendar

One of the most important items for any website is to keep the content fresh and keep your market engaged. You will read many places about setting a schedule for posts or blog entries. This is easier said than done. One way to avoid a stale site is to create an editorial calendar. There is a WordPress plugin to help with this and not only create the calendar but to schedule posts. With this you can write your posts ahead of time and schedule them to be released. So you can keep a regular schedule but create your content when you have the time. Here are some tips about creating a calendar.  Go here to get the plugin and watch videos about how it is used.

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Use Hootsuite To Track Social Media

If you are going to use social media, you should track it as you would any marketing effort. One very effective tool for small business owners is Hootsuite. You should use it because:

1. You can View multiple accounts and sources. You can have a personal twitter, company twitter and company facebook. Post and read from any of them.

2. Makes it possible to track your results accross networks to know if you are having any kind of impact.

3. You can schedule your messages. If you get inspired and wright several posts you can schedule them out over a few days.

4. It is free or not cost. We get a lot of value from the free account.

5. It is very easy and quick to use.

6. There is an app for all the devices that matter.

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Value of Social Media Users

It is  interesting that in a large number of homes people are seeing social ads while they watch TV. This levels the playing field for small businesses. While someone ignores an expensive ad purchased for TV by a large car company, your little social ad catches their eye. There is a reason Nielson is measuring these views now as well as TV ads.

You can see full article here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/infographic-the-most-valuable-digital-consumers/

 

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Sometimes we think of the About page as a throw away page.  If you do, then you should bury it but you also lose an opportunity to talk about yourself.  This article is targeted to bloggers but almost all of the points work for a business as well.

http://thestoryoftelling.com/10-rules-for-writing-about-me-page/

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Cloud Based Mind Mapping

I’ve been using MindManager for a few years to create maps of projects, meetings etc.  It is a great project but it is stand alone for the base package and it is costs $350 to purchase.  It is a desktop app so you install it, do updates and all the other things that go along with desktop software.  To share with others, you must e-mail files or sign up for their Catalyst product at $9 per month.  To use the maps on my iPad, I used iThoughtHD and moved my files through Dropbox.  MindManager does now have a iPad app but I didn’t get that far with them.

A few weeks back I decided to try MindMeister.  The environment looks very robust and comparable to Mindjet in many regards. It doesn’t have Office/Outlook integration but I do not like using the desktop versions of those products any longer.  It runs completely in the browser, I have only tested Chrome.  It costs $59 for an individual or $9 a month for a group or business.   No software to install or purchase.  They store all the files. You can tag them, put them in folders and share with anyone.  If you make a map public you can embed it in a web page, blog or e-mail.   They also have iPad/iPhone apps and an Android app coming.  They can all work off line so you do not need to be connected to create and edit maps.

Highly recommend mind mapping for organization and communication and MindMeister is a great cloud based tool to make it happen at a great cost.

 

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Four Little Used Facebook Marketing Tactics

There are many ways to market your website and business with social media.  Many are pretty common such as like buttons and adding your facebook link to your webpage etc .  Others are more obscure and just as important.  We are linked to a post that talks about four different items.

Use Insights to Gain Metrics.  Just as we need to know the traffic for our website, we need to know how people are using our Facebook page AND our website.  You can find out how people are sharing from your website.

Allow Facebook Comments on your regular website.  This gives a lot more visability to your website.  A simple like can be hidden in the large amount of  information on Facebook.  A comment can really standout.

Keep track of local business listings.  These are automaticly created by facebook and others can edit them. You should as well for obvious reasons.

The last item in the post is about Facebook boxes showing friends which is fairly common.

An excellent article you can read more about at SEOmoz.com.

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Utilizing Twitter for Business Marketing

While many business people are just beginning to understand the value of Facebook as a marketing tool, most still dismiss twitter. This is a mistake for many reasons.  Twitter is growing at an amazing pace which you can read about here.  It is very much connected to rocket like growth of mobile web.  In short, it is not going way,  it is growing.

Secondly, utilizing Twitter can be fairly low effort. Publicizing what you are thinking or reading is easy with the correct tools.  You can have facebook posts automaticly tweeted. You can tweet about interesting subjects as you read them to share the knowledge base. You can put buttons on your website and blog to let others tweet about your content or products.  You can include a window of your tweets on your site to give it a more interactive feel.

Connecting twitter to your Facebook, blog and website are no brainer ways of creating more traffic on all of your sites and since it takes very little effort, why not do it. For more tips on how it can help with your business, read this article.