When a campaign has had enough time to mature and is managed well, I’ve found that the broad matches end up having equally good, and often times better conversions. I’ve read blog posts where authors conclude that broad match keywords waste money, but I think it’s because they’re going off of a limited data set, spanning 30 to 90 days of trial. This often isn’t enough time to make broad match keywords work.

Let’s break down the Phases of your PPC campaign and what happens as your account matures:

New AdWords PPC Accounts

Phase One: Month 1 to 3
For every new PPC account, I start with the exact and phrase matches in all groups. If the daily budget isn’t being exhausted, I slowly add the broad match version of the best keywords to the Ad groups until the budget is maxed out. The first 3 months of PPC management is the most volatile. During these 3 months, the CPA will fluctuate wildly because of:

1. the buyer life cycle – CPA is super high in the first 30 days because of lack of buyer action
2. trying different ad copy
3. trying different keywords
4. new and still developing Quality Score. Keywords start with a lower QS, and matures slowly with higher CTR, so the click through costs start out high and decrease over time.

Generating a Base of Historical Data in your PPC Account

Phase Two: Month 3 to 6
Now that your Campaign has collected enough data, we can mine for negative keywords and new keywords. Negative keywords will make your broad & phrase match keywords more effective. This data isn’t available in the early stages. Incrementally adding more phrase/exact matches as presented by Opportunities is also important. Landing page testing also because another majority focus, while managing ad copy, bids, and improving QS is minority. We can’t change too many factors at once! I want to lower your CPA by creating a robust negative keywords list.

Phase Three: Month 6 to 9
At this phase, you’re still doing everything mentioned in the first two phases, and now you have solid metrics to make good decisions. Usually by this point, campaigns are hitting their daily maximum budget because you have a wide campaign and good CTRs. Analyzing metrics to figure out what to pause/reduce/improve by using Google’s various campaign management settings is the major focus. If you’re performing well in SEO, then those metrics also feed into improving your PPC campaigns, and vice versa.

Keeping on Top of PPC Changes

Phase Four: Month 10 to inf.
Overall your PPC management follows a dynamic spiral (See spiral model for IT dev which is sort of related). Each month, there are are not only new problems/objectives, and various techniques that we’ll use to address them, but also Google’s constant evolution of the PPC tool itself gives us sharper ways to make the most out of your Adwords budget.

However once our clients are trained to easily make their own blog posts, it’s also important for them to be training on effective content writing for the web. Here are some WordPress posting tips I want to share with WordPress newbies and small business owner clients:

1. Use “external” instead of “internal” keywords for Titles & URLs. Write titles to include keywords others will use (and lead with these words) Don’t use brand or product words that are unique to your business. For example, compare this title: Is it ok if I lay them off? vs. Considering Employee Lay Off?. Here’s another one, compare: “New Updates for Our Clients” versus “SEO News for Small Business Owners”
2. Eliminate “empty” words where possible, especially from titles. Empty words not only make your content harder to read, but make it harder for your content to rank. Words like have, from, and then, become, update, etc. say nothing about your content.
3. Use headings and subheadings. Google looks for H1, H2 tags for relevance. The title of your post should use the H1 tag. Then use the native “Format” drop down to create subheadings (Heading 2, Heading 3) with good keywords to break apart and summarize paragraphs of text. This is also good for readability
4. NEVER create duplicate pages or posts with the same content. Pages with the exact same wording/content are harmful to your SEO and site authority. If these pages exist, have them deleted and redirect the old URL to its duplicate.
5. Avoid using custom styles, font sizing, custom colors. Aside from bold, underline and highlight, any other font styling should be done purely through a well designed theme and use of the H1, H2, H3 and paragraph style tags. Using custom font styling and sizing adds unsophisticated code to your content and and makes your website styling harder to change in the future.
6. NEVER copy and paste directly from Microsoft Word into WordPress. We understand that not everyone will feel comfortable drafting posts directly in WordPress. (We do encourage it. Forgo Word altogether.) So when you want to copy content from Word, use the Paste from Word button to strip out funky code.
7. Use the native bullets or number styling instead of manual numbering or dashes. Don’t manually number things. Use the ordered list styling buttons in your WordPress Editor for those sections.
8. Bold main keywords relevant to your website. Bolding is minor way of telling search engines what the focus of your content is about.
9. Make keywords the anchor text for links to another resource, and not just the words “click here”.
10. Add ALT tags to your images. Alternative text is another opportunity to add relevant keywords to your content.
11. Fill in SEO meta details for each post. If you’re using an SEO plugin like All-In-One SEO Pack, then you also want to fill in the Title and description area of this section. This is usually found at the bottom underneath your post content.
12. Remember to add your post to the right category. Use the categories to keep your content organized into themes.

Local Link Building Strategy

What map marker are you?

Citations are an important part of SEO for your local businesses. And over years, with the patents, changes to search results, and local pages design Google have made, specific local marketing efforts are more important. Citations contribute to a good link building strategy for your company, especially if you have a clear cut branded image. Even a mention of your brand name helps you rise in SERP rankings because the citations lend to your credibility and authority.

Some local internet marketing experts have debated over whether citations provide an accurate reflection of web marketing trends. Google’s recent removal of citation sources from the Local Places page design has many speculating if this indicates that citations are no longer important. We see evidence to the contrary. The change in the design does not automatically mean there was a change in the search algorithm.

Citations Give Your Customers More Opportunity to Review Your Business

Reviews and user generated content are also an important part of a good local marketing strategy. And the citations you build on review sites open your business up to more reviews. And reviews are a form of user generated content. Recent changes to Google SERPs hints that user generated sentiment are an influential signal in their search algorithm and effects rankings for local businesses.

As of this moment, Google cannot depend solely on its own data as an accurate source; they must rely on others and this includes reviews of your business. Google relies on an aggregation of external directories and listings for reviews. While Google may be trying to cut out the other local sources eventually, this may not be the inevitable result with the advent of mobile apps. So until then, build citations and build them everywhere with accurate data and full profiles.

Local Factors Trumps Freshness

For awhile Google focused a lot on “freshness” as a relevancy indicator for their search results. But 1 in 5 searches on desktops have local intent, so in order to remain relevant to its users Google has been focusing on localization for some time now. And let’s not forget that local advertising avenues are worth billions of dollars, so it’s not surprising that Google is trying to dominate this market too. There’s so much opportunity as print advertising starts to convert to online. If anything, Google’s aggressive push for relevancy in local could easily double their current revenue. (Yea, no kidding!)

When you open yourself up to reviews, generally you’ll get more positive reviews than negative. This trend has been documented by research, even as far back as 2006 by BazaarVoice. The review distribution follows a J-Curve, with most reviews on the positive side. Unless of course, your product/service is really truly crappy or unethical. If you’re a good business, you’ll likely hover between 4 or 5, with some studies showing that the average aggregate is around 4.3 out of 5.

Negative Reviews & Managing Your Online Reputation

Negative criticism can come from many places. There’s the traditional and popular review sites such as Google Local and Citysearch, but opinions from your customers can also come in form of tweets, Facebook comments, Foursquare tips, blog posts, and a variety of other social tools and websites. It is important to monitor all your reviews, both good and bad, engage your customers online, and take appropriate action when necessary. As a business owner, it is not enough to simply read the reviews & comments people leave your business, you must do something about them too.

When a review contains profanity or malicious content, often times the Terms and Conditions of the hosting site will allow you to flag a review for removal. Places like Yelp and Google allow you to respond publicly to the review. At Flow Simple we encourage all businesses to respond with a quick “Thank you” to the positive ones. That way when you do get a negative one, it won’t seem out of place for you to respond and explain your side of the story. With Facebook and Twitter the comments and replies are quick and easy. A simple acknowledgement of someone mentioning you in a tweet, comment or post is good for managing and growing your online reputation.

Monitoring Tools to Help You Track Reviews & Comments

There are many tools that make this process easier and efficient, and when you work with Flow Simple, we’ll both use these tools to monitor your the buzz about your business, and train you on how to use these effectively to respond to your customers. These are our favorites:

• Google Alerts: Tracks any mentions of your business name on websites, blogs, discussions, etc.
• Hootsuite: A nice social media dashboard to monitor Twitter, Facebook and other tools all at once.

Aside from tracking just your brand name, it can also be useful to track:

• keywords related to your business in a localized area
• your competitors
• industry news that can serve as content to report or retweet
• local news outlets and sites to improve your press relations
• your employees
• names of products that you use in your business or service

Encourage Positive Reviews (& Checkins)

Encouraging and explicitly asking your customers to review is good business practice. (Yelp being an exception, and to quote Matt McGee, they live in a “world of pixie dust and unicorns.”) Offering incentives for reviews and sharing does work, and may be good for your business if you are lacking in good user generated reviews to help boost your listings viability and overall SEO efforts. For most service based business the ROI from offering incentives is easy to see and justify, and often times the incentives don’t need to be huge to encourage your customers to review you or check in.

Having your customers review you or check in to your business is another way to get some free marketing, a great way to build customer loyalty, and increase your retention rate. So before you’re you’re feeling desperate to go cough up a ridiculous deal for Groupon at a total loss to you, try an incentive deal for checkins and reviews and see how effective this can be!

The 21st century has ushered in new paradigms and concepts for how we work and collaborate. I firmly believe that a small business with a solid stack of useful SaaS tools, and well defined processes can scale more quickly, and also run circles around an old school business. These cloud based web apps make us more efficient, and give us so much visibility into how we work. I think they are a key ingredient in scaling one’s business from a 1-person shop to a viable entity.

A Path for Implementing SaaS Tools to Run Your Business

While I went through some analysis paralysis to decide which tools to adopt, I stuck to my guns on my criteria for how I pick my web services.  For Flow Simple’s growth and research, I roughly divided my path to implementing SaaS tools into four phases.

• Phase 1: Money Tracking
• Phase 2:  Project Management
• Phase 3: Efficiency/Automation Project Decisions
• Phase 4: Integrating Money + Time + Efficiency

Tracking Money with Web Services is a Easy: Phase 1

I’ve implemented Freshbooks for our invoicing, and we’re collecting some great data on revenue. Freshbooks has some good reports on profit & loss, aging, collection, revenue patterns and fun stuff. This data can be ported to a more robust accounting/cashflow/payroll tool eventually if need be. Freshbooks API integrates with several account tools.  So far I’ve given Outright and inDinero a spin and they both suck. Perhaps they just aren’t suited for my type of business. Either way I’m not gleaning anything insightful from their data and interface.  Xero and Billflow are next. Xero seems most promising.

Expensify, our receipt and expense tracking app is heaven sent. And it just gets better with every new release. Of course it integrates seamlessly with Freshbooks. Those two tools together make it possible for me to do our quarterly estimates in a very short amount of time. And until I’ve exploded past the $1M a year mark in revenue, I don’t feel the need to outsource this task. It is simply amazing how efficient these two tools are and how powerful I feel.

Project Management Services Don’t Meet Expectations for Criteria: Phase 2

I’ve trialed 6 or 7 different project management and time tracking apps in the last 6 months. This doesn’t include the two dozen PM apps that I’m aware of and spent an hour chewing over their tour & features. None of them meet my criteria. There’s such a gaping hole here, that I’ve even considered building my own. I’ve had dreams about what this interface looks like visually. But this is too large of an undertaking and is clearly not my core business. I’ve had a lengthy discussion with the VP of Mavenlink about their service. Mavenlink seems to be headed in the right direction but doesn’t have enough functionality for me to adopt it. Autotask had the function I want, but their solution goes against my very strict philosophy on web apps, and does not have an API that would play nicely with my stack of tools. It is clearly Frankenstein software, and would make working suck.

I’m now thinking about breaking down the whole project management functionalities into even smaller components. I will need to find specialized tools that meet those super-niche areas. Those components include time tracking, project collaboration, and group task management. I’ve adopted Beebole as my time tracking web app. It’s super new, but even in its early stages it shows a lot of promise. I am worried about the lack of already coded integration pieces, and more so the scalability of this tool in being able to handle more than 10 to 30 ongoing budgets/projects at once. The UI does not lend itself to this. Next, I’ll be checking out Wunderlist and Todoist and Wedoist for my big task management dashboard. And I still use Mavenlink for project collaborations.

A Visual Dashboard of Internal Metrics Collected From Our Web Tools: Phase 3

When I can clearly and accurately translate time into cost, we should be able to see what tasks need to be done more efficiently. Ideally a lot of what I’d like to accomplish I’m hoping there are already tools/services out there that can be taken advantage of. I’m assuming by this Phase of my “Let’s Run my Business on Web Apps” I’ve already defined a data set (e.g. the cost of service translated from time), and I can extract it easily. I want to take this data and import it into a flexible database and be able to display a dashboard of stats beautifully and visually in tables, charts with a nice UI. This will help me synthesize.

When I can visually see potential costs savings, I will also know exactly what I’m willing to invest into programming a tool to automate tasks, spend time to come up with better processes, or consider other solutions. To enable me to make the right decision here, I imagine there’s a point when I reach X number of clients where it should trigger an engineering project. Questions like this: When do go from manual labor to software automation? should be easily answerable given my new dashboard of internal stats at this phase. I think it is similar to this pattern of “Is it better to buy or rent?”

I think I’ve found some tools that could work to build this dashboard. Or I feel like they’re somewhat getting at it. From my limited knowledge, it’s like I can see the potential, but I just don’t know how to go about using them. Check out:

1. http://metricly.com/
2. http://mixpanel.com/platform/
3. http://www.geckoboard.com/ And look, it pulls from Mixpanel.
4. http://www.mynextcustomer.com/
5. http://excellentanalytics.com/

Now, you might be thinking, why would I want to shell out around $500 to $2K per month to use their services when we can build and own our own? Put simply, I don’t want to build a software company, I want to take advantage of the cloud and web apps to build my own local internet marketing company. I want to stay focused on providing the best internet marketing services, and build what we need on top of what already exists. And more importantly if we pick the right tools/services/companies, it’s their mission to evolve, update, upgrade, and generally do a kick ass job and fill that need. I firmly believe that building this in-house won’t be as sustainable as a company whose sole focus is building the best time tracking app, the best dashboard or etc. Our value is in the service & delivery of internet marketing for local business owners. Period.

Scaling Past Your Bottle Necks with the Cloud: Phase 4

Achieving all of the above will then allow for scaling our business more quickly. I don’t know what my bottle necks will be at this stage if the above 3 Phases have been implemented and have had time to mature in the company. I want to be able to push the growth speed factor. I want to be able to say yes, I can handle 50 new clients right now, TODAY without hesitation.

I have a feeling that this is possible and it can be done. I can’t find any books on scaling service businesses. I can’t find resources where companies talk about the scaling issue and how they solved it. But like I said in my intro, the right combination of good process and good web tools is part of the answer!

6 Questions To Track Marketing ROI

Here are some questions I send to every new business I engage with:

1. Generally, what can you tell me about your current prospect and sales metrics?
2. How many leads and customers do you average per month?
3. How much revenue do you see per month?
4. What is your average sale per customer?
5. What is the average lifetime value of your customers? (Average revenue per customer.)
6. What is your prospect to sale close ratio?

Not all businesses think about the above questions or have the same approach, and some clients often come back to me and ask, what do you mean by customer? What do you mean by lifetime value? Some clients have never taken the time to think about their business in this way! Here are some additional clarifying thoughts:

• What is a customer? A customer is a customer period. Whether they buy a $1 product and never come back, or buy $10K in one transaction. What’s important is to track your averages. Track mean and mode, and the average of those 2 numbers becomes your average sale per customer.

• What’s lifetime value of a customer? This can get pretty complex. Is it just the value of business the customer brings you? What if they refer you to someone else? What if you upsell them later with another promotion? I’ll suggest a simple approach, because when it becomes a headache to track, and you don’t end up tracking it at all.
  • If you’re service based, I’d track the mean and mode for how long a client stays with you. This average is your lifetime of customer. Then figure out the average revenue per customer by looking at all the transactions over that time period.
  • If you’re transactional, I would figure out the average # of transactions per customer and use that as a metric. Take that and multiply it by your average sale and you now have the lifetime value.

• What is a prospect? Any person that you have an email, phone or address by which you have permission to use for outbound marketing. If you seem to get tons of email leads, I would qualify this further by limiting it to only those who are double opted in. “Likes” on Facebook or increased Twitter followers are nice to track as a separate metric.

Establish a Baseline and Monitor Your ROI

Once you have accurate insight into your current sales and marketing metrics, then it is easy to establish a baseline by which you can measure the success of new marketing endeavors.

Let’s say you figure out that you average $1,800 in lifetime value for each new customer. And historically you know that for every lead you get, you convert 1 in 5 into clients. We can use these two simple metrics to establish how much you can spend per lead.

And let’s say ideally, you’d like an 6 to 1 return on your marketing dollars. We’d take $1,800 and divide that by 5, and divide that by 6, which gives us $60. This means you can spend up to $60 per lead in order to achieve and maintain an 6 to 1 ratio. Now you have more confidence to try new things, and pit different opportunities against each other. Of course, tracking the source of those leads and the new clients is also important in order for you to accurately track your return on investment. I’ll talk about what formal and informal things you can do to track the sources of your leads in another post.

Advantages of SaaS

There are many advantages of utilizing SaaS apps over traditional software. Here are some top reasons:

• Save money. SaaS apps tend to be utility based which is awesome for lowering costs. You can pay as you go, and are only charged for what tier of service you use. There are no additional deployment, IT, hardware or implementation costs either.
• Save a lot of time. Deploying traditionally licensed software takes more time, and usually more training. SaaS by their very nature tend to be easier to get up and running on in much less time.
• Better infrastructure. SaaS apps also usually operate in the Cloud which means you can access your application and your data anywhere you access the internet.Things associated with the Cloud include reliability, scalability and flexibility which allows businesses to streamline services and not worry about infrastructure overhead or management of the required hardware for traditional software. IT is no longer a concern.
• Always using the latest version and take advantage of new innovations. With SaaS new features and fixes can be released to users immediately. There is no pain or cost of upgrading software licenses and no waiting for major releases.
• Security. Believe it or not this is often true for small to medium sized businesses. Your data is more secure with a 3rd party SasS vendor, than it is being managed in-house by a small IT resource. There also tends to be less incidences of downtime and reliability issues.

Here are some other articles on traditional software and SaaS:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/81590/The_True_Costs_of_Software

http://www.crmlandmark.com/saasTCO.htm

http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Software_as_a_Service

Long Tail Keywords Concept

The concept of long and short tail keywords was coined by WIRED Magazines Chris Andersen in 2004. Andersens model of the long and short tail keywords shows that short tail, or popular keywords, are only responsible for less than 30% of all searches made on the internet. These short tail keywords yield high volumes of searches but are not nearly as targeted or profitable as long tail keywords. In addition, long tail keywords are much easier to rank higher in search engine results pages. Long tail keyword searches happen a lot less frequently, but put together, they make up the remaining 70% of internet queries.

Why Use Long Tail Keywords?

The benefits and advantages of using long tail keywords are simple. Specifically, long tail keyword, are more targeted and specialized. When a visitor searches for where to buy half priced Nike shoes they are expecting sites that have only half priced Nike shoes and nothing else. This gives you, the marketer a chance to provide your customer with your product and your product alone, which in turn converts to higher closing sales ratios.

While short tail keywords are highly competitive, with long tail keywords there is a considerably lower amount of competition. Less competition means you can rank on the first page of Google much easier. Though long tail keywords do not bring as much traffic as the high volume short tail keywords, the traffic converts at a much higher rate due to being targeted and specific.

The Long Tail Mindset for Local Business

As a business owner, think about long tail keywords by asking yourself:

• What are your customers specifically searching for?
• How do your customers find your business when conducting online searches?
• What sets you apart from other businesses?
• What questions or phrases are relevant to your business?

Additional information on long and short tail keywords such as this SEOmoz Keyword Research Guide, and this video of Rand Rishkin explaining long tail Chris Andersens model are particularly good.

Most users won’t ever really need to know the definition of the Cloud but the concept in itself is fairly interesting. At a minimal level Cloud computing combines three different types of technologies, which is why the definition for the Cloud can be so confusing. A brief overview of these three technologies is as follows:

• Grid Computing – Allows multiple servers to combine into one large server. The awesome thing about grid computing is if one of the nodes or servers fails the grid as a whole remains unaffected, and you the user, also remains unaffected.
• Utility Computing – Another type of technology that is gaining more attention in the IT world and has become an extremely cost effective way to pay for services. Utility computing essentially means the user only gets charged for what they use, no more and no less. This is often compared to an electric or water bill, which I will get into later.
• On-demand Computing or SaaS – (My favorite!) Most cloud services can be managed from the internet. You can access your web software services from anywhere you access the internet. What this means for the user is that you could seriously damage your own computer, but with all of your data and files on the Cloud, you wouldn’t lose anything!

What the Cloud Means for IT

When a business decides to choose a cloud provider, they don’t have to worry about in house IT to run checks on such software, manage the everyday software problems, compute server needs, maintain products or set up web services. In house IT theoretically, can be completely replaced by Cloud hardware and services. For example, if a business cuts down on their own servers by implementing the Cloud, there would be a lot less need to employ IT experts, thus saving a substantial amount of time and money.

The Utility Concept of the Cloud

People familiar with the Cloud often use electricity as a metaphor to describe how it works as a utility. The reason people use this particular metaphor is because when using the Cloud, users are charged based on only the amount of computing they use, much like paying for an electric or water bill. IT companies make services available through the Cloud, and charge users for what they use, as opposed to charging a monthly or annual flat rate. Cloud computing has been around since the 1960s but just recently has become more affordable. For many businesses this is an easy way to cut down IT costs. The Cloud scales computing power cost down drastically and in an efficient way.

Hopefully I’ve clarified what cloud computing is and how it works. Here are a couple other informative reads:

• On Big Think – How To Transition To a Cloud-Based Infrastructure
• A Google Book on the Web and Apps that covers the Cloud

Pashmina, I’ve spent the last week and a half recovering from the Summit – not just mentally and physically, but also electronically. See, on Monday after the Summit, all hell broke loose – my hard drive failed and I lost everything…

I stopped reading right there, immediately empathized, and then cringed. Why is a high powered entrepreneur such as Michelle spending “a week and a half” recovering from a failed hard drive? This shouldn’t be happening. Not any more. Not in the 21st century. Not when there are people like ME to tell you there’s another way, and I can help you get there. I’m challenging you to embrace new technology. Embrace changes that can prevent loss in productivity and time. Get on the cloud, and lead the way for others in your network to do the same.

What’s the Cloud?

Let me put it this way: you could literally smash my laptop against the wall, and I wouldn’t blink. I’d still need a new laptop, yes. But I wouldn’t be thinking about data recovery. I’m no longer worried about viruses or hardware failure. This is because all my valuable data lives online, accessible on the internet, from any connected computer (or phone). So if my hard drive, or computer fails, I can head to Best Buy, and recover in hours. If I can access the web, I can access my data. That’s one definition of what it means to be on the cloud.

No part of my digital life resides exclusively on my hard drive. Every piece of data I own also simultaneously exists on some web based app or service. My email, documents, and photos to start, but even beyond that from my banking, invoicing and all my interactions with my clients, it’s all online or on some web app. About three years ago, I made a short post for a dead simple way to backup critical documents, and it’s still valid today. It takes three simple steps, and it’s easy to get started.

A Web Based Office Run By Simple Web Apps

Transitioning to the cloud implies that you’ll transition your business to function on web apps. “Apps” aren’t just limited to that Weather widget on your iPhone. Apps also encompass things you’ve used on the web like Google Maps, Facebook, or Twitter. And more robust services like Freshbooks (for online invoicing and billing) or Mailchimp (for email marketing). These are apps too. And unlike traditional desktop software, web apps tend to be small, specifically focus on doing a few things well, yet extendable. They often can integrate and share data and information with other web apps too.

Switching to web apps and services has other benefits too. Aside from being able to access your data from any computer, and almost any modern web browser, web apps also don’t require maintenance or upgrades. I can’t think of anyone who isn’t annoyed by iTune’s constant notifications to upgrade. Imagine never having to upgrade ever again. Web apps upgrade on their own. You’ll always be using the latest version, which means it’s also more secure.

Cheap Online Recovery

For those of you with Apple you use Time Machine for a continuous incremental backup of ALL your data. Head to an Apple store and chat with them and they’ll set you up to have all devices backup with Time Machine. The trifecta of bulletproof backup is: local backup to external media (with Time Machine or any Windows backup software) + Cloud Based Online Tools (Google Docs, Flickr, Vimeo, etc.) as mentioned above + and finally cheap online recovery.

Back Blaze backup service is a no brainer. For $50 a year this painless and easy solution will continuously backup your computer. You have unlimited storage, and you have a suite of restore options when you need it.

Love Your Tech

One last thing I’ll say for those of you resisting the change, or holding on to old methods of working. I know it can be daunting, but it’s NOT hard. You worry that the next thing you “upgrade” to will suck, or won’t make your life easier. I’m here to tell you that it will, and that you can do it. Get the right advice, and choose wisely. You’ll be happier, more efficient, and may end up saving money in the process. Some of the newer web apps are SO good, that you’ll wonder what you ever did without them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people call me months later and say “OMG I looooove this thing. I don’t know what I’d do without it!”

I invite you to comment, and ask for advice. Think of a tech need you’ve been trying to solve, there’s probably “an app for that.”