If your business has products or services that require regular billing, you might want to look to PayPal to automate the billing process.
In this short video on How to Set Up Recurring Billing in PayPal, I'll show you step-by-step how to automate recurring billing, whether you want to bill once a month or twice a week, and whether you want to bill for six months, a year or forever.
Once you've set up the recurring billing PayPal will generate code you can add to a Web site, blog, or even put into an email.
Adding photos to your blog posts is a great way of making them more eye-catching. However, the cost of royalty-free imagery starts to add up, and you also don't want to end up being sued because you used photos without permission.
Which got me thinking: why don't I offer up my photos to other bloggers in the hopes that they'll give me attribution and link back to my Flickr page, increasing my online visibility? I wasn't sure how to go about it, but it turns out it's pretty simple, as this video, How to Share Your Photos Through Creative Commons will show you.
There's a number of reasons small business owners and entrepreneurs should consider Gmail as their primary email tool:
Great spam filters (the best I've used)
Your email is synced whether you're using the office computer, your home computer, a computer at the Internet café in Brussels, or from your iPhone
Insanely fast search
It's free
The threading of messages is fantastic (90% of the time)
However, the default setting of Gmail is to send your emails from you@gmail.com. That's not so good for a small business (or any business) that's trying to brand itself. You want all of your emails to come from you@yourcompany.com.
(For those of you who still have your AOL email address on your business card it's time to step up. Your email scribbled on a cocktail napkin has a more professional feel.)
And no, Gmail's not perfect and it does take some getting used to; perhaps the topic of another blog post & video.
In the short video below I'll walk you through how to add your domain-branded email to Gmail, and how to make it the default email on your account. Or, you can watch How to Send from Another Email Address Using Gmail at flyte's YouTube channel.
Lately I've been doing a number of presentations on blogging and social media, and in these presentations I talk about the power of RSS. You can use RSS to stay on top of your industry, your competition, your clients or simply your interests in a time efficient manner.
However, the idea of RSS is confusing to a lot of people, judging by the number of hands that go up during that part of my presentation.
It's a shame that something that has Simple as its middle name should be so complicated.
Every Web site has conversion points; actions you want your visitors to take to move them down the sales funnel. It could be clicking on a "buy now" button, signing up for an email newsletter, completing a contact form, and so on.
Using Google Analytics Goals we can track this activity at our Web site. By setting up goals we can find out not just how much traffic a search engine or Web site is sending us, but what's the quality of that traffic, and even what each lead is worth.
In the video below you can see how to set up and use goals to gain new insight into the activity at your Web site, or you can watch How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics at YouTube.
In this ongoing video series on Google Analytics we've come to the content section; specifically, looking at what people are doing at your site.
To continually improve your Web site's effectiveness you need to have a better understanding of which pages people are landing on, which pages they're viewing, and ultimately where they're abandoning your site.
Google Analytics provides insights into all these questions, and gives you a cool site overlay that breaks down which links people are clicking on for every page on your site.
Traffic reports are an essential tool if you have a Web site or if you're running an online marketing campaign. Tools like Google Analytics give great insight into how people found your site and their behavior once they get there.
However, if you spend time on your own site you may be skewing the reports which reduces their effectiveness. Luckily, Google Analytics gives us filters so that we can, well, filter out internal traffic. In the Google Analytics Filter video below I walk you through how to create filters that will block your own activity at your site.
If you want to filter your own traffic and you have a range of static IP addresses, or you have a dynamic IP address you have a little more work ahead of you. Google Analytic's help section has loads of information on that, but here's the quick start guide:
For Ranges:
Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14 IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing how visitors find your site and their behavior once they get there. Based on that information you can continue to improve your Web site and your marketing campaigns.
Once you login you are greeted with the dashboard: a quick overview of some of the more important reports Google Analytics provides. Although the default report shows you a month's activity, you can change the length of time or even measure your previous month's activity against the same time the previous year.
You can also move the dashboard reports around to suit your needs, add new reports, and remove ones that aren't of importance to your business.
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