Thankfully, life is a continuous learning experience and I have finally seen the light.  I am an enlightened author — thank you Lord! Instead of splitting my focus amongst a myriad of tasks I’ve decided that for my next book I wil do things smarter, quicker and much, much easier. Would you like to know my new secret to authorship? (I knew you would; we’re all curious.)

My List of Author Shortcuts

Online Marketing Specialists. I’ve discovered that there are a group professionals who specialize in supporting authors, just like me.  These Online Marketing Specialists specialize in setting up author book tours (virtual and otherwise), creating author-centric websites that are designed to promote my books  through blog tours, social media and webinars.  Pretty cool, huh?

Transcriptionist. I am currently crafting my third book in The Witch series, but due to changes in my personal situation, I haven’t really had much time to sit down and type.  So, this time around I’m doing a great deal of my writing with my voice. It feels a bit strange talking into a machine, but if you treat it like a microphone and pretend you’re on stage, it can be quite fun. The advantage of dictating my story is that the transcriptionist will create a formatted version that I can use for my first round of editing. It’s so quick and easy I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You know, being an author just keeps getting better and better.

Digital Publishing Specialist. Electronic books are definitely the way that an author wants to go these days. Of course an author can do it himself, after a bit of trial and (lots of) errors, but why go through that hassle. If you are an author, hiring a Digital Publishing Specialist to transform your manuscript into the Kindle, Nook and iBooks format is a wonderful timesaver. These specialists are up-to-date on the various formatting rules and style conventions so you’re guaranteed that your manuscript will be done correctly and quickly.

In today’s world, being an author is so much more than just being able to craft an entertaining story for your readers. There are multitudinous aspects to self-publishing that having a strong team is very important. If you’re an author pressed for time (or you just want to streamline your creative process) then an Online Marketing Specialist, a dedicated transcriptionist and a Digital Publishing Specialist are your best investments.

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Daryl T. Sturgis is the author of The Witch Series featuring the meanest witch in town, Solstice Macaffey. He is currently working on his third installment in the series as well as an anthology of short stories.  You can download a free excerpt of his short stories at his website.

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What is Google+1?

Google+1 is Google’s newest revolutionary experiment. They’ve been working on it for quite some time now. It’s a fairly new aspect to global marketing that was only released a few months ago but is steadily gaining users.

What makes Google+1  so significant?

To put it simply, Google+1 assists users in differentiating the worthless web pages from the non-worthless web pages. Whether you are a marketer, or an average user wanting to learn more about how to market their own website, you should have viewed the plus 1 button at some stage or another.

In essence, the Google+1 button functions similarly to that of a Facebook like or a tweet; however there is a slight difference as the plus 1 button has the ability to influence the hierarchy of search results and rank.

So is Google+1 a game changer?

Well, have you taken a look at all the marketing websites lately? They’ve been practically littered with users offering their Google+1 services. And whether you like it or not, Google plus 1 is going to influence one’s rank and in turn, the internet marketing world.

Well, Google is determined to meet and improve a user’s internet experience. Before, Google+1  was just Google’s newest experiment to compete with other influential websites such as Twitter and Facebook. 

Why is it hard to establish yourself with  Google+1?

Unfortunately there are many marketing sites that automatically link build or “plus 1” sites for a fee. They fool Google by their automated systems, and in turn other users into thinking that that particular website with dozens of plus 1’s is popular because its rocks or is fascinating. Whilst in reality, it might stink or suck horribly.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to stop this and whatever we do there will always be people who are willing to exploit the system. Google and various other websites have been dealing with these exploiters for years and have made little progress. So we have no choice but to accept this and move on.

Bottom Line

Regardless of this, Google+1 will still help rank your website; just be aware that you are probably not competing with the others on fair ground. How much it will influence your websites overall ranking, I can’t be totally certain. However, I can guarantee that it will influence the rank of your website. (And besides, it never hurts to try.)

Setting up a your Google+ business page and adding Google+1 buttons to your websites and blogs is just one of the small jobs that virtual assistants provide for their clients.

Just as the name says, Google Chrome Plus is a beefed up version of Chrome. Google Chrome Plus has extra bells and whistles that its predecessor lacks. One such improvement is the ability to disable the background communications which snacks on your CPU resources. Let’s look at a few more.

Google Chrome Plus Features

• Users can close pages and tabs with a double click tab. If you decide you want to exit a tab in Google Chrome Plus, you just double click on that certain tab to close it.
• Gestures with the mouse. With the click of the right mouse key you can draw your way across the web. For example, when you right click and draw a line going down and your page will jump to the bottom of the page. Watch this video demonstration to see how it’s done.
• “Super Drag” feature.  In Google Chrome Plus you now have the option of just dragging a link onto anywhere on the screen and it the link will be viewed on a new tab.
• Users can also view Google Chrome Plus while having an Internet Explorer  tab open. Now you are able to open compatible IE links from within Google Chrome Plus. To do this, click the Internet Explorer button that is placed towards the end of the location bar.
• While in the context menu, users can use batch downloading tools. This is a great convenience especially for users of download tools such as NetAnts, Orbit, QQ Xuanfeng, IS, FlashGet3, FlashGetMini, NetX, WebThunder, Xunlei. All you have to do is right-click the link that you are interested in and select your favorite download manager.

My Google Chrome Plus Experience

I’m always curious, so when I first heard about Google Chrome Plus I immediately downloaded it to what’s what. Overall, I am happy with how the browser functions. There are, however, a few annoying aspects.

I am disappointed that my LastPass, Skype, TweetDeck and a few other helpful extensions aren’t working at the time of this post. Hopefully they will be providing support for Google Chrome Plus in the near future.

And although I like the ability to double-click to close a tab, I find it a tad bit frustrating as it seems I have a “heavy” finger. So sometimes when I go to switch from one tab to another I end up closing it instead (grrr!) I suppose that is why they have that handy button to reopen closed tabs. It’s become my new best friend.

I was also a little surprised that Plus didn’t automatically import my bookmarks from Chrome. It wasn’t a hard transfer (Export bookmarks to HTML file/Import HTML file  into Google Chrome Plus), but I think it would have been more efficient to have it do the importation without assistance from me.

My Google Chrome Plus Bottom Line

Despite these little bumps, I am enjoying my experience with the browser. If you are interested in giving it a shot,  you can find this free application here. You have nothing to lose with Google Chrome Plus and you just might gain a new way to enjoy your time surfing the ‘net.

How do you design a memorable logo? Follow these tips.

• Consider Scale and Different Mediums

The first thing to decide on is what format to create your logo in. As a rule of thumb, creating your logo in vectors is much better than creating rasterized logos.

Vectors are infinitely scalable. Scalability (meaning the ability to look great at tiny sizes or huge sizes without loss of resolution) is crucial for logos, as they can go on anything from a business card to a giant poster board.

You need to consider all the different mediums your logo could end up on: TV, cardboard boxes on the products you ship, other marketing materials, etc. Make sure the logo will look great on all different mediums, including when it’s in black and white.

• Color and Typography

How do you choose the colors and the type for the logo?

Choose based on the “vibe” you want to create.

For example, Coldwell Banker’s logo is blue and the type is an authoritative type. This works great for building trust among higher net-worth individuals.

On the other hand, the McDonald’s logo is red and yellow, looking like an inverted smile. This worked great at creating an association of fun for family and kids all the way into the 21st century.

The vibes you want to create has a large influence on the right colors and typography for your logo. Start with the vibe you want to create, then work backwards to the color and specific type.

• Create five Different Designs

If you hired a professional logo designer, they’ll generally sketch out several different designs and have you choose the one you like best.

When you’re designing your own logo, follow a similar process. Sketch out at least five different potential designs. Once you’ve sketched it out, let it sit for a day or two before coming back to it and deciding which one to proceed with.

In this process it often helps to get feedback from other people. Ask business associates, employees and past customers what they think of your new logo and which one they like best.

Designing a great logo is both a scientific process and an artistic process. Scientifically, it’s important to make sure that the logo works in all different kinds of formats. Artistically, it’s important that the logo conveys the right emotions and vibes that you want it to convey. Make sure it’s memorable and that you get feedback before releasing and finalizing the logo.

photo credit: MU-Bayern

Having great data is crucial for building a successful website. That said, a new website may not really want to pay for data in the beginning. What are some of the best easy-to-use and free web analytics tools?

General Analytics

There are three primary analytics platforms that provide a full spectrum of data including referral data, traffic data, content data, search data and more.

• Google Analytics – This is the 300-pound gorilla of the tracking space. Google Analytics provides just about all the data you could every want, 100% free.

The downside to using Google is that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable having all their sites linked together by Google, especially if they’re experimenting with unconventional back-linking techniques or other “grey” areas of marketing.

• GoingUp – GoingUp provides just about everything Google Analytics does, and a little more. GoingUp also provides heatmap tracking in addition to the typical analytics data, meaning you can actually see where people are clicking on a graphical display. This can give you a lot of useful information about your user’s behavior.

• Piwik – Piwik – Piwik – Piwik is an open source self-hosted tracking solution. If you prefer to have your tracking hosted on your own servers rather than risk having it on someone else’s server, Piwik can be a great way to do it.

They have a strong reputation for building great software, the code is written by hundreds of dedicated developers all over the world and their platform provides all the functionality that Google Analytics does.

ConceptFeedback.com

Want to know what people think of your design before you launch? Why not post it to a group of marketers and designers for review?

ConceptFeedback.com is a free website where people can post their business, marketing and design concepts to be reviewed by their peers free of charge.

It’s a great way to get a gauge of what experienced designers and marketers think before you launch.

Compete.com

Compete.com is a competitive research platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic statistics.

Though their data isn’t “accurate” per se, it can still give you a very good gauge on where their traffic is coming from, as well as what kinds of keywords are working for them.

Though you do need to pay to get complete access to Compete, the free version gives you a limited number of keywords and traffic sources – enough to get a very good sense of what your competitors are up to.

These are some of the top free web analytics tools available to webmasters today. Most of these tools are easy to use and can provide you with data that will make running your business much, much easier.

photo credit: dmhoro

Having a good relationship with your virtual assistant can be such a huge source of relief. Tasks that you no longer want to take care of yourself can simply be handed off with confidence that they’ll get done the way you want them done.

How do you make your relationship with your VA one that will last? Here are a few tips.

Give Crystal Clear Directions

Vague descriptions like “Clear my schedule” or “Book an appointment with X” can be very easy to mess up. Instead, make sure you provide crystal clear directions, including what your criteria is for a job well done.

For example, for booking appointments, you might tell your assistant:

“Please book me an appointment between 9am and 5pm with Jill. Prefer a restaurant meet rather than in my office. Let her choose what kind of food, I like all kinds. If she doesn’t have a recommendation, just pick a high rated place for us from Yelp. Please email me the date once it’s booked and also send me a text reminder the day of.”

Clear directions make it easy for VAs to follow and leave little to chance.

Create Process Documents for Repetitive Tasks

For repetitive tasks like checking email, booking travel, setting appointments and so on, create process documents that outline how you want the process accomplished.

For example, with booking travel, the process document might say something like:

1. Please book all travels on my MasterCard ending in 5479.
2. Please send the receipt to receipts@mydomain.com
3. Please check Expedia, Kayak and Orbitz for the best price before booking the ticket.
4. Please also check two days before and after the date I specified for the best price, unless I specify that the flight has to be on a certain date.
5. Please email me telling me when the flight is booked. Add it to my Google Calendar. Please also send me a reminder two days before my trip.

Once you have your process document set up, you can just send your VA a message like “Please book me a flight to New York around Nov 2nd” and know that it’ll be taken care of exactly the way you want it.

Tell Them When They’re Doing Things Right

Make sure you tell your VA when they’re doing things right. So many bosses make the mistake of only correcting their employees, which gives them the impression that they’re not doing their job right.

Creating the sense that they’re a great assistant will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who feels like they’re doing a great job is much more likely to do a great job. Showing appreciation for a job well done can go a long way.

Managing your VAs well is the key to having a long-lasting relationship with your assistant. Remove potential friction points by making all your assignments crystal clear. Lay out process documents for repetitive tasks. Make sure you let your assistants know when they’re doing a good job.

photo credit: Ken_Mayer

How can you use smart brand-building techniques to improve your brand with social media? Here’s how.

Define Your Brand First

Before you post anything – before you even sign up for a social network, define your brand.

What does your brand stand for? What’s the “vibe” of your brand? What are your primary spoken and unspoken messages? Who are you targeting?

Answer these questions. Everything else moving forward needs to fall in line with the brand you define. Your profile photos, the color of your pages, the content you post and everything else should all match up to the brand you want to create.

Choosing Your Social Networks

There are dozens of social networks you can join, many of them specific to your industry or topic. Unfortunately, usually it just doesn’t make sense to join them all. Depending on your time and resources, you’ll usually only want to establish a presence in one or two social networks.

Pick the social networks that make the most sense for your audience. If you’re in a corporate setting, you might choose Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’re in a tech-savvy industry, you might choose Twitter and Facebook. If you’re primarily targeting music fans, you might choose just MySpace.

The network you choose depends entirely on where your audience is. Figure out what networks your audience uses the most and be on those networks.

Post Brand Relevant, Value-Added Content Regularly

If you don’t stay in contact with people regularly, they’ll forget you exist pretty quickly. Make sure they’re continually aware of your brand by posting regularly. Build up brand loyalty by posting content that your audience will really love. And what they will love really depends on who your audience is.

If you’re targeting a corporate or professional audience, they might love a daily three-minute video giving powerful tips on public speaking.

If you’re targeting a college-age crowd, they might be more interested in shocking or humorous pictures and/or videos.

If you’re targeting a political audience, they might appreciate links to news stories not covered by American media.

Know your audience. Post the type of content that your specific audience will love. Focus on providing value rather than trying to get people to buy or pass on your profile. Build up real loyalty rather than going for the quick sale.

Building a strong brand using social media involves first clearly defining your brand, then choosing the right social networks to be on and finally posting content that your audience loves. If you do this on a consistent basis while being true to your brand, your brand will become stronger and stronger both in your customer’s mind and in your market in general.

photo credit: Marc_Smith

Why is social responsibility and ethics important in business? Here are three good reasons.

People Want to Buy from Ethical Businesses

Take the wholesaling industry for example. This is typically a cut-throat industry with razor-sharp profit margins, often under 10%.

Yet still manufacturers of green and eco-friendly products are finding that more and more wholesalers are placing orders from them rather than their more established competitors.

Why? Because more and more people are choosing to buy socially responsible products and not purchase from companies that damage the environment.

Socially responsible and ethical products don’t cost much more than their socially irresponsible counterparts. More and more smart consumers are switching to socially responsible products.

People Want to Work for Ethical Businesses

Would you rather work for a company that stands for something benefiting humanity as a whole, or a company that just stands for its own profits?

Employees in ethical businesses are often willing to work harder, with more passion for the same or even sometimes less pay than their more cut-throat counterparts.

Not only will people give more to your business without you having to ask, but you’ll also enjoy working there more! When the people around you love their work, you’ll naturally enjoy your working environment more.

People Want to Partner with Ethical Businesses

Socially responsible and ethical businesses often find that other businesses come to partner with them before they look to partnering with other less socially responsible companies.

Take Kiva for example, a non-profit micro-loan facilitation website. They get literally hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in free legal and organizational work that they’d never get if they were primarily motivated by money.

You don’t need to be a non-profit company to get the same treatment. If your company as a whole conducts business in a way that benefits the greater good, people will generally want to do business with you rather than the other guy, all else being equal.

The bottom line is, people want to be associated with businesses that are moving towards being socially and ethically responsible. The days when businesses can walk all over their employees, trash the earth, destroy the long-term health of the economy and still prosper are over.

Today consumers, employees and business owners alike are becoming very aware of the many social and ethical issues that abound in today’s world. Building a business that caters to this awareness is not only the right thing to do – it’s smart business.

photo credit: markhillary

How can you get “Twitter savvy,” so you can jump in feet first without making potentially embarrassing mistakes? Here’s how.

Learn the Shorthand

Twitter users (aka. “tweeters”) have their own language they use. The language is often necessitated because of Twitter’s character length limit. Because you only have 140 characters, you’re more likely to say “PRT” than “Please retweet.”

Twitter has a very comprehensive glossary you can view on their site:

http://support.twitter.com/entries/166337-the-twitter-glossary

Learn the various common words and phrases used by the Twitter community.

Learn How to Use Hashtags

Hashtags are used primarily to identify messages on a certain topic. Let’s say you’re running a sale and want people to be able to have discussions about your sale. You might tell anyone tweeting about your sale to tweet with #salomatic.

Someone tweeting would then put #salomatic at the end of their tweet. Anyone seeing that tweet could just click that hashtag to see all messages tagged with #salomatic. This effectively creates a chat room or message board of sorts on the spot.

Follow People in Your Industry

What should you post about? How often should you post? What are topics people are interested in hearing about?

The best way to find out for yourself is to start following people in your industry. These could be competitors, customers or industry news channels. Basically, follow anyone that has a strong voice in your market.

This way you’ll start to get a real sense of what your market is like and what conventions are in your market. You’ll get a sense for how often others post and what topics people tend to respond to.

Following, Being Followed, Posting Messages

The best way to learn your way around Twitter is to just use it a lot. Before you start using Twitter on your business account, try using Twitter in your personal account.

Start following your friends and ask your friends to follow you. Post tweets and watch your friends respond. Respond to your friends’ tweets.

Just get used to how the whole system works. Once you’ve learned how to create topics with hashtags, you’ve learned the various common words and phrases and you’ve learned how to follow, be followed and post messages, then you’re basically conversational in Twitter.

Once you’re conversational in Twitter, the next step is just to dive in head first and start using Twitter a lot. Learning Twitter isn’t hard, it just takes a bit of basic understanding and a lot of regular use. In just a few weeks, you can quickly become very Twitter savvy.

photo credit: LoopZilla

How do you make sure you don’t lose your shirt on AdWords while you build your way to a profitable campaign? Here’s how.

Start with Search Only, No Partner Networks

By default, Google AdWords turns on both content networks and search partner networks for any campaign.

Never, ever combine a search campaign with a content network campaign. They should always be separated.

When you’re first starting, make sure content network is turned off. Test on search first, then content network if search converts, as content network traffic tends to be quite a bit harder to convert.

Also turn off search partner networks when you’re starting. This will reduce your traffic by a bit, but it also ensures that your traffic comes from just the highest quality source: Google.com. If search partners are on, you’ll get traffic from other partner sites as well (example: AOL.com) whose quality isn’t as high.

Set a Daily Budget

Set a daily budget. Generally it’s a good idea to start with a lower budget and work your way up, rather than starting with a large budget and losing a lot of money.

Make sure that you set Google to distribute your traffic evenly throughout the day rather than rush you all the traffic possible. Keep it on this setting until you know you’re converting.

When you know you’re converting, increase your daily budget and tell Google to send you as much traffic as possible when it comes, rather than distributing your budget over the day.

Watch Your Quality Score

The difference between a “Good” quality score and a “Great” quality score can be as much as four times in the cost of CPCs.

Having a great quality score (QS) means having a content-rich, highly relevant landing page with keywords and ads that are all highly relevant. Your CTR also plays a large role in your QS.

If you have some keywords that are getting low QS ratings while others are getting high QS ratings, consider pausing the low QS rating keywords.

Your quality score has a huge impact on your ROI. Often times it’s much more important to optimize for quality score rather than CPC or CTR.

Track Everything

Know where every single sale came from. The goal is to eventually eliminate all the keywords that aren’t converting and have only converting keywords left. The only way that will happen is if you’re tracking everything on the keyword level.

As a rule of thumb, spend double the payout/profit on any given keyword before ruling it out. For example, if you make $4 per lead on a pay-per-lead campaign, then spend $8 on a keyword before ruling it out as a non-converting keyword.

If you follow these tips and start small with a budget, run only on Google search, optimize for quality score and track every conversion back to the keyword level, you can safely know that you won’t be throwing money away on Google AdWords. You’ll also be on track to finding your first profitable campaign in the very near future.

photo credit: Ivan Walsh