Why would you want to advertise on Facebook? For starters there are 900 million people on facebook with 526 million daily active users.  That is a lot of people.  But of course you are not trying to communicate with all 900 million people. You only want to communicate with those who would have an interest in your product.  Facebook makes this possible in a way that is unique to online marketing.

Facebook knows a lot about you. You volunteer this information to be social, to communicate with friends and to follow your interests. Some of you have told it your marital status, where you went to school, how old you are and where you work.  These can all be used to market your product. Lets work on an example, myself.  Facebook knows that I have an interest in beer.  I’ve posted about beer. I like home brew shops, breweries and sites that talk about beer.  Other people want to sell products to people who have an interest in beer. Facebook makes this profiling possible. Let’s look at how we build this type of ad.

First we go to our facebook page and build an ad. You are presented with the ad builder screen. We start with a destination. We want to sell a product so we are directing them to a website. We are using a landing page. (More about landing pages in a future post.) Next, we type in our ad title and text and an optional image.
Now we start our profiling. Facebook has started the profiling by limiting our ad to the United States. You are free to remove that restriction or to add Canada or another country to it. You could also target a state, zip code or multiples of these locations.   Next we go for interests. For our fictional ad, we are looking to target home brewers. We type that in and of course Facebook has that as an interest.  This now limits our target to the 11080 . people Facebook believes have an interest in home brewing. We could add other interests, age etc as well.

We then select our budget for clicks. This is a bidding process. Other people want to get ads in front of these same people for a range of interests.  If every time these people go to a page and there are ads out there that have bid higher than our ad, we will not make it onto the page.   Facebook is suggesting 87 cents will get our ads on pages of home brewing fans in the US.  We should stick with this bid and monitor it to see how much it gets used.  We are only bidding on the clicks. We will also be able to monitor how many times it is displayed. 

We now have an ad that will run for a month. It will get in front of a large precentage of the 11080 Facebook users who have shown an interest in home brewing.  For those that click on it we will have 87 cents. This is very effective and affordable advertising.

I’m still waiting for my Gdrive or Google drive.  Right now it says “We’ll email you when your Google Drive is ready”.  Bummer!  Don’t they know I want to try it and tell the world?  I have been reading about it and it sounds great.  There are many advantage but first the downside.  Not ready for iPhone or iPad just yet. Not a big deal. Just a few hundred million of those devices but it is coming soon.  Second, it is not ready for some very important people. Finally, it is not integrated with a lot of services yet.  For instance, I use a password service that lets me backup/sync my passwords through Dropbox. It has been common for services to use the Dropbox API (Application Programming Interface) to allow a user or company to sync and backup information between devices and locations.

Okay, now the good stuff that I have only been able to read about.  It is 5GB off the bat compared with 2GB for Dropbox.  Some others allow more such as SkyDrive from Microsoft.   Then you can by more for not that much money.  100GB is about $10 a month.  That is a lot of storage.   Next is Google Docs integration. Obviously they needed to do this type of integration. It will allow you to open, edit and create Google Docs within your new G Drive. This can be online or on your PC.  Very useful indeed.  Finally, they are doing OCR and search on the contents of your drive.  So you can search for text but you can also search by type of document and supposedly search for images. I really need to see the image search.

So we have another cloud storage option and it appears to be a very good one.  From what I have read, if you use Google Docs to any extent, this is a no brainer.  If you only use other types of documents, you might want to test and keep reading.

• Your signature can be text, quotes, images and links.
• Keep it as short as possible.  Combine information on a line with the pipe character.
• Forget the mailing address, it is not relevant most of the time in e-mails.
• HTML and graphics are cool but not always displayed.  Consider all text.  Nice comparison here.
• Avoid multiple numbers and addresses.  Pick your preferred e-mail, phone and web address.
• Include a call to action.  You can add your own static one or
• Use  Wisestamp to include your latest tweet or post.
• If you feel you must use graphics, utilize a service like Wisestamp to ensure you get graphics and formatting in more e-mails.

For me, I’m going with the plain text for now. Keep it simple and work on other items.  I’m starting with the following:

Rod Middleton, Cloud Evangelist at Information Matters
rmiddleton@informationmatters.com | 616.225.9910
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Latest on the IM Blog: Tips for E-Mail Signatures

Here are the specifics on how to do this with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo.

We will have our page changed shortly along with some tips.  No, we were not part of the facebook preview program!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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