More on Cloud Computing and File Backup

 
A recent – and apparently irreparable – crash of my Microsoft Outlook got me thinking about cloud computing and backing up files, again.

So, I went online and located a web-based calendar program with every intention of using it to replace Outlook. But, I couldn’t do it. As I began entering personal information into the program, I realized that – even though I know it’s protected – I didn’t want that stuff just floating around in cyberspace.

I know it’s irrational, but it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of that. I bought a paper calendar and am now using it instead.

All this led to a slightly different approach to using the Internet to run your business. Perhaps, if you’re irrationally paranoid, like me, you’re better off installing the programs you need on your computer and storing your files in a safe place online, instead of just being “out there” in cyberspace. Your files are always backed up and you have access to them from wherever you are.

There are many options for regular online file back up and I should mention now that I haven’t signed up for any of them – yet – so can’t make any specific recommendations. Here are a few that I researched:

Mozy (www.mozy.com) offers 2 GB free and unlimited back up starting at $4.34 a month.

Norton – from Symantec – (www.symantec.com/norton/) offers 25 GB for $49.99 a year.

Mediamax (www.mediamax.com) has an interesting twist, adding a sharing and collaboration option. This addresses one of my concerns, easily accessing, using, and updating files stored online, which essentially uses your online backup like another hard drive.

Filesanywhere (www.filesanywhere.com) is a little pricier, with cost is based on storage size. It also has file sharing options as well as backup.

Long story short, online file backup is easy and inexpensive, so do it. With a little research, you may also be able to use a modified version of cloud computing, keeping the more robust software you now have, and still have easy access to all your documents from wherever you are.

More on LinkedIn

 
Yesterday I posted some observations about LinkedIn as a social networking option and posed a question, using their Q&A section, about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA.

I was quite surprised at the response. I received three from individuals with specific suggestions and three from vendors. I don’t know how this rates in comparison to others’ experience, but it tells me that there’s activity on the network and that there are folks out there who are willing to offer their advice and assistance. This is a very good thing.

And, as I do more research and make a final decision regarding my telecom needs, the six suggestions I received – yes, even the vendors! – will be at the top of the list.

This leads – rather indirectly – to an observation on social networking, marketing, business, and life in general:

You really do get out of it what you put into it.

Regardless of what your marketing strategy is, you have to work at it and make it a part of your daily routine. Even the best plans don’t execute themselves. Someone needs to be calling on prospects, writing blog posts, updating the website, or sending out press releases. And it’s a lot of work. It’s easy to put it off, but doing so will jeopardize the long-term success of your business. Even sustaining your current business level requires the infusion of new customers.

LinkedIn Groups

Taking advantage of all social networking has to offer requires time and commitment to set it up and keep it going. But as I found with my telecom question, there is an active network out there to tap into.

One of the best ways to do that on LinkedIn is with Groups. LinkedIn presently has seven general categories for groups with a total of 283,994 individual groups. So, you can probably find several groups that meet your needs.

If not – and I find that hard to believe – you can always start your own. Creating your own group is a simple one page fill-in-the-blank process on the “Create a Group” tab on the “Groups” page.

LinkedIn offers a very professional, business-oriented option for social networking, which may mesh nicely with your business model. Even if it’s not your primary social networking channel, it’s definitely worthwhile to belong and be active.

LinkedIn: The Professionals’ Social Network

 
With the gallery website up and running, it’s now time to look at social networking options to expand my network and – hopefully – my prospect and customer base. For me, LinkedIn is probably not the best place to start for this, but I’ve had my profile posted there for some time now and I’m more familiar with it than some of the other social networking sites.

The most important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it’s a business networking tool, unlike Facebook or MySpace which have a business element to them but began their lives as social gathering places. It’s not the place to talk about your recent trip, your pets, or your favorite band.

Now that can be a good thing. You know right up front what you’re dealing with, and depending on your business it may be a great source for prospects, sub-contractors, collaborators, and other contacts to help you achieve your goals.

Your Profile and Connections

You start by creating a profile – essentially an online resume – that can be viewed by others. It’s out there 24/7, promoting your expertise to anyone who might be looking. The challenge is to get people to look…

And you do that by adding Connections. Search through your old Rolodex (remember those?) and contact lists for people you’d like to add and – if they’re on LinkedIn – invite them to join your network.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As an example, I have 32 people in my personal network. In my secondary network – people who know the people I know, but don’t know me – I have more than 1,700 contacts. And in my entire Linked In network there are more than 194,000 people. Now, none of those contacts has ever called to offer me a job, but you can see the reach the network has.

Joining Groups

If posting your profile is a somewhat passive way to build your network, joining – and participating in – the groups LinkedIn offers can really get your name out there. You can post – and respond to – questions and ideas related to the group’s activities. I admit that I’ve been a non-participant, but I just read through some recent entries for the groups to which I belong and can see the potential for soliciting information from your peers and providing it as well.

Keeping Up with Everything

Once you’re set up, it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on what’s happening. LinkedIn does the hard work for you, alerting your network connections when you make a change to your profile and informing you about what others are doing.

Adding to Your Profile

Of course, the more you have in your profile, the easier it is to renew old relationships and build your network. I just found two people I worked with more than 15 years ago and invited them to join my network. It remains to be seen if they even remember me – or if they do, how positive that recollection is – but they just popped up as links from my previous jobs.

LinkedIn continues to add options to make your networking more effective. One I just found – and really like – is the ability to link my blog to my LinkedIn profile. The titles and first few lines of my most recent posts now appear on my profile.

Searching for More

LinkedIn also offers Search options for People, Jobs, Answers, and Companies. People and Jobs are pretty straightforward, but Answers and Companies have some interesting options.

In Answers, you can either ask or answer a question – duh.  But this feature allows you to poll your peers for their insights into your specific problem. And, of course, you can share your insights as well.

Here’s a quick example. As I was writing this post, I asked a question on LinkedIn about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA and have already received a response – basically a sales solicitation – for me to call about all my telecom needs. It will be interesting to see what else comes in, but people are reading these things.

The Companies feature allows you to search for potential employers as well as service providers and includes background information to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

And that’s just the Free Stuff

If you’re willing to spend quite a bit more – $49.95 a month for the Business Plus program and $499.95 a month for the Pro program – you can really leverage your LinkedIn presence with more messages, more profile searches, and more alerts. But for me, free is just fine, thank you.

More Challenges of Technology: Websites, HTML, and Ecommerce

 
Well, it’s been the technology week from hell, what with the computer crash, launching the website, and trying to set up my PayPal account.

This will probably sound a lot like whining – and it is – but hopefully, there will be some useful advice mixed in as well…

First, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. My computer’s fixed – now all I have to do is re-install all my applications and restore my backed up files. Here’s hoping…

I’ve also come to the conclusion that using a web host-provided template is not all it’s cracked up to be. Not that it’s terrible, if you don’t want to modify it very much and are just going to upload your own content. In that case, it should work fine. Although there will still be some nasty surprises.

The big one is HTML or HyperText Markup Language. The bad news is you’ll have to learn a little of it, even if you use a site template, and it can drive you crazy until you learn to think like it does.

If you’re lucky, HTML is the only programming language you’ll have to deal with because there are others out there and they make HTML look easy.

Then, you’ll have to figure out how the site development program works. There are tutorials, but I found that they only cover the basics and are sometimes out of date. No matter how you look at it, it takes time. This can either be your time – as I’m doing – or someone else’s time that you have to pay for. You just can’t get away from it.

And if you think you can get along without a website, forget it. When a dinosaur like Yellow Pages has an online presence, you can be sure you’ll have to do it too, or you’ll be watching your customers flock to the competition.

I’ve mentioned  before that I know enough about DreamWeaver – Adobe’s web development software – to be dangerous and I’m about to find out just how dangerous I really am. I’m really tired of being hamstrung by the constraints of my host-provided template when I know that the things I want to do can be done, with just a little know-how.

For example, anchors. Not the kind used on boats, although these perform the same function for spots on your web pages. You’ve probably seen one in action when you get to the bottom of a web page and there’s a link that says “back to top.” You click on it and that’s where you go.

You can also link to anchors on different pages, which is something I’d like to do. However, according to my host’s online support, I can’t do it using the template I have and they recommended that I find a good book on HTML. Thanks a lot!

I hit another glitch when I tried to install my PayPal buttons. Everything went fine until I tried to use the “Continue Shopping” button. I spent most of the day going back and forth with support and reading through the 384 page users’ guide. Do we really need anything so complicated that it requires 384 pages to explain? Unfortunately, we do because setting up your own ecommerce program will probably cause your head to explode.

I found the solution by accident and I’ll share it with you – as I did with the folks at PayPal – in case you have a similar problem.

First, they don’t tell you that you have to paste additional HTML (there it is again!) code into your link to redirect it back to your website.

Second, the instructions in the users’ guide are unclear and don’t match what their website shows in many cases. Not that I blame them; it’s easy to update the website and a nightmare to rewrite the users’ manual – believe me, I know.

Third, you have to past in the link from the website page you want shoppers to return to.

Finally, and this is what really drove me insane, the instructions show the sample code ending in “.html” but don’t you believe it. About 90% of my problem was the fact that the code I used included the “.html” at the end. I deleted it and – what a surprise – it worked just fine!

Now I’ll grant you that everyone I’ve dealt with in tech support over the last few days has been very nice and helpful. They just couldn’t figure out what my problems were or how to fix them.

So be prepared. You’ll have to endure a lot of frustration and figure out a lot of things for yourself, unless you’re willing to pay a professional.

Is it worth it? I think so. Technology is rushing along and the competition is using it. If we don’t, we’ll be watching our customers go somewhere else and won’t be able to do a thing about it.

Making Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Work for You

 
Now that my art website is up and running – somewhat – it’s time to focus on making the Internet work for me – and you. My expectation is that by using all the options available, to the degree that they fit my business, I’ll be able to drive traffic to my website and generate sales.

Using Keywords

One of the easiest things to do is to incorporate key words into your website’s Title Tags or Meta Tags. If you’re using a web designer, this is easy; just tell them what to change.

If you’re building your own site using templates provided by a hosting service, it’s not much harder. For example, JustHost, which hosts my website, has a video tutorial titled How to Set Meta Tags which walks you through the whole process, and it really is easy.

The hard part is deciding what keywords to use. In a recent post titled Use Google AdWords to Increase Website Traffic I touched on the subject. The important thing is to do some research first to get an idea of what words will work for you. Then, review them regularly to see if there’s anything new you might add to keep your site high on search engine lists.

There are no hard and fast rules for this, you just have to experiment and see what works for you.

Create a Blog and Use It Regularly

Search engines regularly search for new content among the millions of websites, blogs, forums, and social networking sites on the Internet. It’s easy to get lost, but a blog that’s updated frequently – a couple times a week at least – will push your website up the list.

Content is important as well. Your blog shouldn’t be promotional. Readers are interested in information they can use. Of course, if you can integrate your product or service into an informative post, that’s just gravy. Just be sure you’re providing information readers can use.

Leverage Social Media       

At its most basic, social media is any user-generated content, whether it’s blog posts, videos, Facebook pages, or any other content created by users rather than by the owner of a site. You can take advantage of social media by creating your own pages and profiles on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other sites and link to your business website. Adding friends to your social network extends the reach of your marketing activities.

Send Out Press Releases

Press releases will create visibility for your business in news results and regular releases will increase your standing with search engines. Just remember that to get coverage, they must be newsworthy and follow the same public relations rules on the Internet that you would using more traditional channels.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The old rules of marketing still apply. To be successful, all we need to do is leverage them in the new media we have available.