Google Drive – The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

Last month we told you that Google was poised to finally launch their cloud storage application called Google Drive, and that it could be a big competitor in the cloud storage marketplace taking market share from DropBox and others.  Well it did finally launch, and their initial offering has a little good, and some bad, and even a little ugly.

The Good

When you sign up, you are allotted 5 GB of storage space, and you can purchase an additional 25GB of storage for only $2.49 per month (a little under $30 a year) which makes it the cheapest cloud storage product on the market per GB.

In addition, if you use Gmail, when you purchase additional Drive space, your Gmail storage limit will be increased to 25GB of storage, so you get a bonus when you purchase additional space.  And you will increase your storage limit with Picasa as well.

They also have a desktop app for both Windows and PC, allowing you to use your storage locally and sync to the cloud automatically, just like DropBox.  Some reviewers have made through comparisons between the two like Witson Gordon over on Lifehacker.

There is an app for Android portable devices and tablets, so those using that platform will be able to sync their files everywhere.

The Bad

To start with, Google did not offer an iOS app, so iPad users and iPhone users are out of luck for now.  Different reports have the Drive app for iOS “almost done” but at the time of writing it still was not submitted to Apple for approval.  I suppose it was to be expected since Google purchased Android back in 2005, they have always been slow to release products on the Apple platform.  It took them a while to release Google Chrome for the Mac.

Google docs users will find that once they sign up for Google Drive that it will replace Google Docs.  Your Docs shortcut on the Google toolbar will be replaced with Drive, although it appears that all of your functionality will still be available.  Some users may not actually see this as a bad point, but the jury is still out as to what will happen to Docs in the future. It was frustrating searching all over for Docs after I signed up for Drive as there was no notice that the two were going to be combined.

What is bad is that in order to edit files created in Word or Excel that are stored on Google Drive, you will have to convert these files to Google Docs programs.  Native Word and Excel files will open only as read only files when you access then online.  So in order to keep from changing from one format to another, they are forcing you to use Google docs as your document editor. Tony Bradley has a good article over on PC World about these issues. You could always just save the files and then download to your machine to edit, but it is adding additional steps that is annoying.

The Ugly

Once Google Drive went live, it got Ugly very quickly as people began posting major concerns about language in the Terms of Use for the new product. The Terms of Use stated that:

“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).”

There have been many articles (ex. from Search Engine Roundtable and another from ZDNet) covering the Terms issues.  Google has tried to clarify the Terms by saying that they are for your protection, and everything is OK, but many are skeptical. Others have been looking into the terms from other services, including DropBox and Microsoft SkyDrive, and while there are some concerns with other products, none have been quite as bad as those with Drive.

Will the Terms of Use and issues with Ownership keep people from flocking to Google Drive, probably not.  These last few years have shown that people are willing to overlook these issues if the service gets the job done.

Will it Be Here Tomorrow?

The ultimate success or failure is yet to be determined.  Not even a month old, there will be growing pains, for sure, and Google has shown that they will work hard to make changes to their products (not always for the better) and they are not afraid to pull the plug if a program is  not doing well (Google Wave, Google Buzz, Health and many others).  They will put the necessary money and their vast resources behind the project.  Moving to the cloud has become a major trend in business tech, so getting  a piece of the pie is important to their overall business strategy. Expect Google Drive to be around for a long time to come.

Do you have a Google Drive account?  Are your going to skip it for now?  Tell us your stories of why or why not?  We look forward to the discussion.

 

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5 Content Ideas for Your Small Business Blog

Posted on April 20, 2012 by

Many times I recommend to clients that adding a blog to their site is a great way to establish them as the expert in their area and to help elevate their business and website over some of their competition.  While it may seem like everybody and their brother are writing a blog, there are actually many opportunities still available for local companies to get ahead in their area by creating some great content for their site, and not to mention Google loves all that new content as well.

Adding a blog to a site is relatively easy.  It is the writing the posts that becomes the difficult task for many.  The day to day grind of running their business gets in the way of adding new posts, and soon there are weeks and even months that go by with no content, and the blog is a ghost town.

Don’t let that happen to you.  Here are a few ideas to kick start your writing and keep you going , keeping the momentum going.

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Google Drive – The End of Dropbox?

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

The last few weeks there has been a buzz about a new product that Google is getting ready to release.  Called Google Drive, it is an online storage area that you will be able to access form any computer or smart device that has Internet access.  There are a number of these services available, and Dropbox is so far the leader of the pack.  Dropbox offers 2GB of storage free to all users, and leaks of the new Google product indicated that they would offer only 1GB of drive space.

Immediately, there were boo’s coming from all parts of the web.  People commenting that Google was going to have to do much better to attract people away from Dropbox and other products that offered much more drive space.  However, the leak may have very well been from Google themselves in a move to gauge reaction and make adjustments before the products actual release.

New reports from Search Engine Journal have the Google Drive coming with a whopping 5GB of free storage space just to start, and adding an additional 20GB of space for a small sum of $5 per year.  If this is indeed correct, it will be a huge move in the Online storage space and competitors will be scrambling to up their offerings, or be left behind in Google’s dust.

One big advantage that Dropbox has on many of their competitors is their desktop app that adds a folder to your computer where you can drag and drop files to for syncing or use as a backup folder for keeping your important files backed up automatically, and the ability to share folders with other dropbox users.

It appears form the screen shot on SEJ’s article that there will similar features in Google’s offering.  With an expected release date just over a week away, we will keep our ears and eyes open and let you know as soon as we see more information about the product.

I have been a Google user for years, but I have a lot of love for Dropbox, and with new features and new ways to get more storage space for free, it will take pretty remarkable product to get me to ditch Dropbox.  Are you a Dropbox user?  Would you switch to Google Drive?  Would you run both services?  Do you think that Google Drive is a Dropbox killer? Tell us what you think.

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Facebook Changing Business Pages Layout

Posted on March 24, 2012 by

Business owners that have a Facebook page for their business need to take a look at your account.  On March 30 Facebook is moving all pages to the new timeline view, like it or not.    Some love it and some hate it, but regardless it is here and you need to make sure that you page is updated.

Part of this change is that your page will now need what they call a “cover image”.  This is a large picture for your brand.  Time to get creative here is you do not have a logo or a picture that will fit the size that they are using (851px x 315px).

In addition tot he cover image, Facebook has updated their page guidelines, but here are a few basics that you need to know:

  • Make sure that you have the rights to use your image.  Images that you find online are almost always copyrighted and can cause serious legal issues if you use them without permission.
  • You can not have any pricing or call to action (Buy Now, Sign Up Today) on your image.
  • Your contact information, your physical address, telephone, email and web address, should only be in the “about” area of your profile – not on the cover image.

A really nice change is the vanity URL change.  In the past you had to have 25 followers of your brand page in order to get a vanity URL (i.e. facebook.com/yourname) but that limitation has been removed.  Now you will be able to choose a vanity URL anytime, regardless of the number of followers.

Here are a couple of examples of business pages that have moved to the new time line view that you can use as inspiration.

What are some of your favorites? Let us know what you think are some of the best and coolest Facebook brand pages are in the comments box below.

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Google Places May Drop Your Listing

Posted on March 17, 2012 by

Recently, SEO writer Andrew Shotland had his Google Places listing dropped from Google.  After searching in vain and contacting Google he discovered that they had removed his listing because he worked from home but did not check the box to hide his address.

Since early 2010 Google has offered an option for those that work from home to use service areas and hide their home address from the places account, but there has been controversy in using this feature.  When originally rolled out, tests showed that if you selected this option, your listing ranking would drop dramatically.  News spread, and people decided against this.  Over time, Google has tweaked and adjusted their algorithm, and apparently there is no discernible difference in using this option.

Now Google is forcing the issue, including this in their Places Guidelines:

“If you don’t receive customers at your location, you must select the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” option within your dashboard. If you don’t hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.”

So if you work from home, it is time to check out that listing.  Make sure that Hide my address box is selected, so that you will continue to have your listing show up.  If your not sure how to do this, or you have not yet claimed you listing do it now by going to www.Google.com/places and searching for your listing.  Or contact us and let us take care of claiming and optimizing your local listing in Google and many other local search sites.  Call or email for the details.

When is the last time you checked your Google Places account?  If you have had any troubles with Google Places or any of the other local search sites, tell us about it below.

 

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New Beginners WordPress Videos

Posted on March 9, 2012 by

We have posted the first of our Beginners WordPress Videos. In this video we cover the basics of logging into the administrative interface in WordPress. For those users that are new to WordPress, it is frustrating when you cannot get into your back end admin panel. If you do not do it at least a couple of times every couple of weeks, it is something that you can forget. And I have had more than a few calls from clients that needed a quick refresher.

If you are not using the WordPress framework on your website and would like to learn about the benefits, we covered some of the advantages to using WordPress in and earlier post.

We hope that the videos are helpful, and we want to make sure that we cover the topics that you are interested in. Please let us know if there are any specific topics that you would like to see a video on. Leave us your feedback below.

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Online Advertising Basics

Posted on February 28, 2012 by

Image that at the click of a mouse, you could advertise to the whole world, or maybe just the entire United States. Would that help your business? How about just your state, or maybe just your metro area or city, maybe that would help? What about just people that are in a 20 mile radius around your location? Sound promising? That is what online advertising can offer you, an much more.

A question that new clients always ask me is “Can online advertising help my business?” The (almost) universal answer to that is YES! No matter what type of business you run (products, service or a mixture of both) online advertising can make a very big difference to your bottom line. Research says that there is over 2 billion people surfing the web, and each of them have come in contact with many online advertisements each and every day.

But what does a small business owner have to do to get started? It’s really not that difficult once you understand some of the vocabulary, and dig in and give it a try. Let’s start with understanding the basics, then I will give you some resources to learn more.

Learn the Lingo

The vast majority of advertising that small businesses (and even big businesses) will run online is what is called Pay Per Click Advertising, otherwise know as PPC.

At is core, PPC advertising is when you pay to have an add displayed on someone else’s web page that has a link back to your web site. When you ad is displayed, it is called an impression. If the person that sees your ad is interested and clicks on the link in your ad, they will be taken to a web page on your site, called a landing page. This action is called a click, and when someone clicks on your ad, then you will be charged. Typically fees are small, but depending on the competition in your market, they could run higher.  When the user goes to your landing page, hopefully the user takes a look at you site and you are able to engage them and generate a new sale or a new qualified lead.  Your landing page does not have to be your home page.  In fact it is better to setup a special landing page that is a part of your website that is geared to having the visitor complete an action – sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, etc. When they complete the action that you want them to complete, this is called a conversion. Our goal in internet marketing is to get conversion rates as high as possible.

Advertising Limits

Now this goes on each and ever day, 24 hours a day, until one or two things happens; you stop your ad or you hit your budget.

PPC billing and budgets are a bit deep for this post, which I wanted to give you some basic knowledge, but we will cover it in more depth in our next Adwords post that will dispel some of the big worries that small businesses have about online advertising. But for the purposes of ths post, I will tell you that all of the big players in the PPC advertising have a system in place wehre you can name the budget tht you want to stay at, and they will not go far beyond that number.

For example, lets say you want to run a Google Adwords campaign, and you allot $200 per month to that campaign.  In the setup of the campaign they will ask you for a daily spend limit.  You set your daily limit to $6.50 per day.  Google will run your ad until you reach $6.50  for that day, then they will take your ad down for the rest of the day.  When the next day begins, your ad will go back up until you hit your limit.

Some companies will have you on a daily budget, other will do a monthly budget, each of them are different.  Some will also tell you that they may exceed your budget by a certain percentage, so be careful of that and read the fine print.  Also make sure that you know what will happen when your budget is met.  In some Google Adwords accounts, they will run your ad until you hit your budget, then they will charge you and start your budget over again not matter what time of the month this might occur.  Others will stick to the 30 day budget and if you reach your budget at day 20, your ad will come down until the next month, or until you tll them to start again.  It is important to read the terms and conditions very carefully, so you are not hit with a huge bill in the middle or end of the month.

The Big Players

Know you know some of the lingo (go ahead and quiz yourself now – PPC, impressions, clicks, budgets) lets get to a few of the big players.

The big gorilla in the online advertising world is of course Google.  Google has a huge share of the market, with over 66% of the search engine market.  Microsoft is the next closest competetior with Bing is a distant second at just over 15% share. Take a look at all the searh engine sats over at Search Engine Watch.

Just how big are they?  In 2011, Googel generated 37.9 billion in revenue.  96% of that revenue came from online advertising.  In fact, Nowsourcing.com put together an infographic that breaks down Googles revenue by market, and it’s very interesting.  There you will see that Amazon.com spent over $55 million on advertising with Google per year with Adwords.  And they are not even the biggest spender.  It is very easy to see that big names will spend big money on online advertising, each and every day - because it works!

Google has put together a basic video on their product Adwords that is great for someone just getting started and wants to learn a little more.  You will learn the basics of how it works, and even a little more.

Google is the big player here, and I would recommend that you put the biggest share of your advertising dollars in the pot to begin with.

Another very large and very popular PPC advertiser is Facebook. Some of you might think that advertising your business on Facebook might not be worth it because all they are is a place for people to socialize. And you would be right, but what better place to talk about that company that did such a great job, or maybe not so great of a job. And with Facebook, since that have all this information on their users, like age and occupation, you can focus very tightly on your demographic and put ads where they will count the most.  Facebook brought in over $3 billion in revenue from advertising last year alone.

Another huge player in the search engine market is Microsoft. The owners of the Bing search engine, they use the Microsoft ad center ads on their pages and related networks.

And another big market where you can target a very select demographic group is LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn caters to more professionals – sort of like the business Facebook.  More professionals hang out here, and they do spend time in “groups” where they discuss specific areas of interest.  Both social media outlets allow you to target your ads to very specific demographics.

Free Money

Make sure that you keep a sharp eye out for the advertisements from Google, Microsoft and others.  They will give you free money to get started.  In fact, we offer new clients $100 in free money to get started with a Google Adwords campaign.  As a partner with Google, they allow us to offer that deal to new clients that are interested in getting started.  And other advertisers make similar offers.  I just saw an offer from Microsoft for $50 free for a new account.  This is a great way to market their offerings because you can use that money to get your feet wet and take a look under the hood before you have to commit any out of pocket money, so take a look around before you get started.

Getting Started

Now I know it can all be a little overwhelming, so my recommendation is to focus on one, and get started. Don’t wait until you know it all.  That day will never come beacuse one thing this industry is good at is change.  Daily we new players and market shars changing.  Big companies buying up little ones, and little ones exploding with hugh growth seemingly overnight.

Just pick one, and when my clients ask, I point them to Google because they have the biggest share. But I can also see recommending one of the others depending on the goals of the campaign.  But pick one and learn about it and get started.

Remember we are here to help, and once you get a better understanding of the process, we can help you manage your online advertising campaign.

What questions do you have about online advertising?  We are interested in helping small businesses learn more about this and we would love to hears your questions, comments and feedback.

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Google Advertising – Just How Big is Google?

Posted on February 12, 2012 by

Just saw a very interesting infographic today developed by Nowsourcing.com.  Is show the 2011 revenues of Google and the breakdown of how much the top advertisers in the top 10 industries spent on Google Adwords last year.  And you thought your advertising budget is big.

Take a look  -

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Take Control of Your Web Site with WordPress

Posted on February 1, 2012 by

WordPress.You may have heard the name before, but never learned what it is for.  You may know someone that blogs and uses it, but never realized how it can change your web strategy.

When used effectively for web site design, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that can be used to build your web presence and give you the flexibility to log in, using any internet connection, and make changes and updates to your web site – instantly. That’s right, no more waiting for updates to be posted.  No more learning HTML or CSS or FTP.  Just a simple login and edit content using simple word processing tools just like you were writing a letter.

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Posted in Web Design, Web Maintenance, Web Services, WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Is Your Web Site Working?

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

Most all businesses these days have a web site. It has become one of the basics for starting and running a business. We put a great deal of time and sometimes blood, sweat, and tears, into getting the site up and running. But once it is running do you know if it is working?

Seeing how much traffic is coming to your website, and where that traffic is coming from is very important information to let us know if our site is doing it’s job and helping us. One of the best ways of doing that is using web site analytics. Sounds scary, but really it is fast and easy to use.

In my opinion, by far the easiest, and most powerful option for you is Google Analytics.  A full featured analytics package, Google Analytics is a time test and well developed program that can be easily setup on your website and within 24 hours you can start collecting all kinds of information about how your web site is working and who is visiting your site.

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