Online Accounting for Small Business Owners – No More Quick Books

Out with Quick Books, in with Fresh Books!

All you need is your Browser, email address and a small budget. As small business owners, we are  so used to hearing the word Quick Books when it comes to Small Business accounting. The majority of us have tried it and could not wrap our heads around it! Quick Books is horridly complicated and we wanted something that was more intuitive, efficient and easy to use without any training. We also needed a client login area that was professional and easy to use.  Lastly and most importantly, we needed something that would integrate easily with our business services & products. After testing multiple online accounting packages, we fell in love with Fresh Books.9JPGQZE9QB7M

Freshbooks Review

What is FreshBooks Accounting?

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that can handle all types of small businesses: Residual Income, Fixed Income, Comission Income, Hourly Billing and Estimate Creation.

FreshBooks has a clean and easy to use interface with features that every small business or freelancer needs without the excess features many accounting packages offer. You can automate your invoices, track expenses, create profit/loss statements and get paid via major payment gateways. Also, you can brand everything, from login to invoices. Something that really stuck out to was the ability to send snail mail invoices online.  All you have to do is create an invoice and click “send by mail” and Freshbooks does the rest.

If you are currently stuck using Quick Books, Freshbooks has a Quick Books client import feature that is easy to use.

Where can Freshbooks improve?

We have not found any missing features or glitches.  If you do run into any issues they have a direct number and included is a community section where you can discuss your questions with other Freshbooks users. From our experience they seem very receptive to feedback and their focus is on providing excellent customer service.

Pricing Packages (Sign up Here)

• Free accounts are available for up to 3 clients
• $19.00 for 25 clients
• $29.00 for 100 clients
• $39.00 for 500 clients

Features

• Automate Invoicing & Collections
• Collect Online Payments – Paypal, Authorize.net, Verisign, 2CO
• Invoice Clients in any currency
• Online Client Center – View and Pay Invoices
• Invoicing – Based on Time, Expenses, Fixed Costs and more…
• Send Snail Mail Invoices Automatically
• Late Payment Reminders
• Time Tracking
• Estimates
• Expenses
• Clients & Staff
• Contractors
• Branding
• Reports- Profit Loss Balance Sheets / Tax Details

You don’t have to take our word for it. Setup a free account and give it a test run.

www.freshbooks.com

Google Maps – Local Business Listings Optimization

Looks like Google is at it again. We just found out that Google is allowing Business Owners to Enhance their business listings in Houston, TX and San Jose, CA. This new services is specifically called “enhanced listings” and it will allow a business to stand out on Google Maps and Map type listings. You will be able to highlight specific offerings like coupons, menu’s, videos and etc.. This will cost only $25.00 per month and there are no contracts to sign.

Heres what it looks like.

If you have been hesitating and unwilling to do Internet Marketing, here’s your chance.  http://www.google.com/help/lbc/enhancedlistings/

We will try this out and by next month we will let everyone know how it is working out for our clients.

Internet Marketing for small businesses – making the right decisions!

I recently came across a client that was starting a business and needed a website. As an Internet Marketer, I explained to him that his website can generate new business and we can do that for him. I went on to explain (thoroughly) what PPC & SEO services entail. We agreed to do both, but first we needed to build a strong foundation for his online advertising initiatives. I was given a 30 day dead line and decided to take him up on his offer.

7 days into the project (skipping all the details) the client called me and cancelled the project. He had hired a Harvard graduate with a degree in Ecommerce to do his website. If you go to Harvard, you are surely a smart person, no argument there.  This graduate decided to build a website for this client and completed the website in one day! Bam, thats awesome right?

Not awesome. I went to the website and it looked as though it was one of the first websites ever built back in the 80′s.  Furthermore, they decided to target keywords in the range of $10-$30 per click. Couple of massive problems.
The website was not professionally built, it did not clearly state what the business did, visually or textually. Furthermore, industry keywords were not used to attract the users attention. Lastly, it was a one page website with simple phrases placed in random order on the site.

When you are building a new website for your business you have to understand a couple of things. Your website represents your business online.  Ask your self  ”would I send a sales person dressed in tennis shoes, frizzy hair, ripped t-shirt to a potential clients office?” Or  ”would i pay this sales person to sell for  me?”. I hope your answer is no.

When you hire a PPC or SEO professional, their job is to bring pre-qualified buyers to your website. The website needs to be clear and concise so the user can visually and textually see that your internet marketing & website will provide them with the product or service they are looking for.  If the website is not clear or professional, you will loose a majority of your potential clients.

This is where Search Marketing experience comes into play. An experienced Search Marketer looks at a website differently than a designer. They look at the usability of a website, such as placement of phone numbers, typography usage,  clear menu system, request a quote buttons/add to cart buttons, and many other features that make a website successful.  Why do they look at websites in this manner? Simply put, their goal is to make you money, if a user cannot easily get in touch with your company,  or easily make a purchase, you are not going to make a sale!

When you hire a web design company, make sure they have real experience working with Internet Marketing, better yet, hire an Internet Marketing company to build your website.  Why? Theyknow what features a website needs in order to successfully run a Pay Per Click or SEO campaign.

Its all about keywords and the layout of your website.  If you are running Pay Per Click, you are most likely running an Adwords campaign.

Its not about outbidding you competitor. Google wants to see quality. When you setup your campaign, every keyword has a quality score. We do not know exactly how quality scores are calculated, but we do know of a few things Google recommends and every search marketer should apply to your campaign.

PPC Quality Score OptimizationTips

• Keyword relevance! Your keyword should be relevant to your website landing page and your ad text.
• CTR – Click through ration: Google is all about the “user experience”. If you write good ad text, then you should get some clicks. This is another relevancy factor in Google’s Quality Score. If you do not get many clicks, then Google will lower your Quality Score, because your ad is just filling space and providing zero benefit to its users.
• Continual optimization of your campaign.  Tracking data. Install Google Analytics and track what your users are doing. Time on site, Conversions, Pages Traversed, Funnel visualization andmore. This type of data can tell you which keywords, ad groups and campaigns are making you money.
• More account optimization. Run reports and figure out which keywords are triggering your ads. Create negative keywords, figure out which long tail words your users are typing in. Create new keywords based on this data and expect higher click through ratios and conversions.

The number one goal of any Pay Per Click Management Company  is to lower your cost per conversion. You do this by leveraging you search data through adwords reporting and tracking data. Make sure your website has tracking installed and your search marketing company is running reports. But, make sure they have the experience and knowledge to make decisions based on this data. If you do not know what to look for, it can become over whelming and you will spend more money  learning what you are doing wrong.

PPC Ad Group & Keyword Optimization

• Take a piece of paper and categorize your products or services. For instance,  I would categorize Gaming Laptops, Business Laptops and Emachines separately.
• When you categorize, you allow your PPC specialist to write your ad text specifically for those keywords. Otherwise you are getting real general and you will miss allot of potential click through’s.
• This will help you theme your ad groups and keep a high quality score per keyword.
• Your click through ratio is also optimized since your add text and keywords match!

If you are a small business owner I would suggest researching a bit and talking to multiple companies about what your goals and objectives are. If you live in Houston, then search for a Houston SEO or Houston Internet Marketing company in Google and you will be able to submit a SEM quote.

You will benefit by seeing the differences in prices, services and knowledge. Some companies are all about helping you business grow and others are about making their own business grow.

Internet Marketing Agencies are in business to make you business grow, make sure your SEM company will show you a ROI through expert reporting. Furthermore, make sure they learn your business and continually optimize your campaign as the months go by.

With so many choices on the Internet, you should be able to find a company that will provide services within your SEO or PPC budget.

Good luck!

“Page Rank does not help with rankings”

Earlier today I was doing the usual, searching for articles on Search Engine Marketing. I ran into some very odd replies to someone asking how long does it take for Google Page Rank to update. Here are some some of the replies below.

Anonymous poster 1“There’s no point in worrying about PR anyway. It’s a minor ranking factor at best.”

Me “Page Rank is part of a multi-part solution called SEO. You cannot just focus on Page rank or not look at page rank. Regardless page rank happens if you do everything you are supposed to using white hat seo ”

Anonymous poster 2 ” Search results are not ordered by page rank. People always say this, But none of them have bothered to check, They just assume that it must be this way.”

Me “Of course not, but the rankings are part of a much larger equation and Page Rank is part of it. You will find a lot of websites with very high page rank show up for keywords that you are working tirelessly to rank for. These websites are not really targeting these keywords and they only have toput a couple keywords in their text and they rank fairly quickly and highly for your keyword. Why? Because they are trusted by other users who found it valuable enough to link to.”

Why is page rank important for SEO

As we all know, everyone looks at page rank, some more than others.  Sites like Facebook and NYtimes have some awesome page rank. Why? Because they are some of the most popular websites on the internet. A lot of the top news portals, blogs, forums talk about these sites and send links there way. Why? Because they provide legit services, content and media.

Before I get carried away, lets talk about why Google added “page rank” to their algorithm. From all of my experience and research I found that the Google’s  “counter spammer unit” led by the seasoned operative Matt Cutts created Page Rank.

Spammers number one goal is to make money by getting more hits, selling a product or maliciously hurting you pocket book. If these spammers could simply create a website and have every other word be their top performing keyword and show up number one, they would probably sink their hooks into the majority of search engine users pocket books in one way or another. In turn, Google would not be such a great tool for finding quality websites, answers and information. And these spammers would get rich and create more websites which would drain Google of any search authority it has left.

So Google wants to trust your website and that is through the Page Rank factor. Your job as a website owner is to get popularity votes (links) pointing to your website from other trusted and popular websites. This is where it gets complicated and I will try to keep it short. Google does not only look at how many website are pointing to your website, they look at the quality of those websites by checking how much page rank is on the site which is linking to yours. Which means, they are also looking at which websites are pointing to that and so forth. Which turns into a massive linking pyramid of websites and page rank calculations.

This means, you cannot just go out and get a million links and expect your page rank or trust relationship with Google to grow. Several years ago I worked with a company in Houston that provided Search Engine Optimization for its clients. They got half of the SEO right, they would optimize a websites code, content, images, alt tags, title tags, meta descriptions and so forth. Next they would submit your website to hundreds of directories over the course of several months hoping for your rankings and page rank to increase. I was mainly an Ecommerce and web development guy at the time. Being new to SEO at the time I had my Ecommerce website put into this service for free and years later it has a page rank of zero. Actually, four months after they submitted me to hundreds of directories my page rank fell from 2 to 1 and then a few months later it dropped to zero. I speak nothing but the truth. I have learned my lesson.

What probably happened was, they submitted me to directories which had poor page rank. Which means,  my website was not having quality back links and in turn they decided that the site should not be shown on the search results as high as it used to for keywords that I used to rank for on the first three pages.  Makes sense right, who wants to buy something from a store that is being linked from sites that are not getting any real popularity votes on the web.

Linkbuildling through directory submissions is not all bad.

Right now I have an excel file filled with about 100 paid & non-paid directories which have high PR and are industry relevant. These directories review submissions and make sure the websites they are putting in their directory are not spam sites.  Included is the fact that these industry relevant directories are content and keyword relative to the content on your website. This means, Google see’s that you are a “Houston Attorney” having a link from a directory of Legal Professionals in a category with other Houston Attorneys. Yes, this is beneficial and a great link to obtain.

Natural Linkbuildling

If you provide a good product or service backed by a real effort to please your customers, you should have zero problems getting some quality backlinks for your website. It can take time and patience but it will happen. You will get links from review sites, blogs, forums, friends, business associates and so forth. Or hire a Search Engine Optimization agency.

Have you ever gone to a Blog and seen comments where some mentally deranged chap decides to post a link to his favorite “Viagra” website in the middle of a Political debate of comments? I know you have. These guys are trying to get links to their website in order to rank higher for keywords. But you will rarely find these websites, they get blacklisted and thrown on the millionth page of the search results. All due to Page Rank factor and of  course other spam deterrent features Google has put into its algorithm.

Page rank does matter when you are trying to optimize your website for keywords

Allot of factors are taken into account when doing Search Engine Optimization. Page rank falls in the middle somewhere and is part of a multi-part solution rather than the only solution. You need to first focus on the “on page seo” of your website by choosing the right keywords, title tags, quality content, inter linking and much more. You also need to focus on “off page seo” by getting some contextual links with anchor text from blogs, pr sites, news sites and other community or article type of websites. If your website is trusted by Google, then you will get closer to being put in front of searchers when they type in keywords which are relevant to your website.

This takes allot of work, start by building a strong foundation, researching keywords and competition. Or hire a Search Marketing Company and let them do the work.