In our never-ending search for efficient working online and increasing productivity

It may seem as if we’re always recommending Google, but they really do offer some really impressive and useful cloud-based tools. Today, we’d like to bring your attention to Google Calendars, a few of the functions to explore, and some possible ways to apply them in your business.

As with many Google Tools, Calendars have recently undergone a bit of a makeover and do look much smarter in appearance on the screen. Here are some of the features we’ve been using, although they are far from being the only ones available!

Multiple Calendars

If you’ve ever tried keeping track of appointments, ‘to-do’ actions and different projects you’re working on in one diary, you’ll know how messy-looking and confusing that can look. With Google Calendars you can have different calendars for each type of activity, and easily identify which is which by changing the colour of each one (as in the screenshot above). I’ve added in a US time bar beside the GMT so I can easily make the conversion when booking appointments.

Sharing Calendars

As with Google Docs, sharing Calendars with a colleague means both parties can edit and add appointments. Handy when you’re trying to allocate time to work on a joint project or two, and fit them in with your individual busy diaries.

Using Tasks

Not everything you want to do warrants setting up a timed appointment on a calendar, although by adding but not specifying a time to an appointment, it will show the activity above the timed slots on the calendar. Using Tasks is more flexible and mean you can set up activities like ‘Follow up Jim’ in a specific calendar, and allocate a day or deadline to complete it, depending on your preference.

Tasks will show up on your calendar screen in a small area of the screen at the top of the relevant day and as a list to the side of the calendar. As well as being able to edit task details, rescheduling is easy to do by simply ‘dragging & dropping’ to where you want them. When you complete a task, there’s a little tick-box which crosses through and fades the task to differentiate it from the unfinished variety. You can clear/delete all the completed tasks to tidy things up on the screen, but I like to save doing that until the end of the day so I can watch the completed tasks adding up

Installing the Calendar Checker (a neat little Google Chrome extension) in the toolbar, shows at a glance when the next appointment is due, changing to red as the time gets closer. Hovering over the icon reveals details of that appointment, and clicking on it opens up the full calendar.

Synchronise with other calendars and devices

Google calendars will synchronise with Microsoft and Apple calendars, although we haven’t tried that function. I (Louise) successfully use it in conjunction with my BlackBerry and online appointment scheduler, Tungle.me. Because of this, I can have access to the calendar wherever I happen to be, and avoid double-booking myself.

If you already use Google Calendar – what’s the most useful function to you? We’d love to know!

Since this is the final working week before Christmas, I thought a few tips for tying up your website’s year end activities may help some of you. For those of you with e-commerce sites, I hope the last couple of months have generated good sales for you!

With all the activities of sending out orders or making sure you’ve finished any client work before Christmas, a few things may get forgotten, so here are a few reminders of things to do before the year end.

1. If you’re running pay per click campaigns with Google Adwords & Microsoft Adcenter, don’t forget to turn off your Christmas ads, or turn them off completely if you’re planning an annual shutdown until 4 January. If your sale starts now, then you may want to change your ads to reflect this.

2. Thank all your customers on your website and send out an e-card if you can’t send individual Christmas cards in the post.

3. Update any specific Christmas content, opening hours over Christmas and New Year if applicable, warn customers of any price rises from 1 January due to the increase in VAT.

4. Thank your customers and contacts on the social networks. It’s important to try and keep your presence up right up until you take a break.

5. Get your website ready for New Year sales and promotions, pre-schedule blog posts, tweets etc ready to go out when it starts.

Finally, don’t forget to take a break yourself! No doubt many of you have been working even harder this Christmas to promote your business, so make sure you take a well deserved break and give yourself the chance to think about your plans for next year.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

But the internet changed all that!  You now have a further 7 ways to let people know about your launch and most of them won’t cost you a penny!

Here’s a simple process chart to show what we mean:

How many of these methods are you using for your product launches?  What would you add?  Do share – we’d love to know

On 19 April 2008 I signed up for my Twitter account

Quite apart from the many lovely social networking colleagues I’ve connected with, being part of the Twitter community has resulted in great phone calls and face to face meetings with like-minded people (who already seem like old friends); and yes, on occasion those connections have led to new business.  Twitter has also become a rich source of news and information; clicking through to shared links and discovering a previously unknown blogger with informative and well-written posts, is one of life’s little pleasures for an avid reader such as myself

It’s so easy to become distracted with all those tempting links just calling out to be clicked on! We are increasingly using Twitter as a ‘real time’ news service which feeds our desire to be among the first to hear the stories as they break.

And in a world where information flies faster than the proverbial speeding bullet, trying to keep up with important notices and their implications for business, has become both time-consuming and increasingly, totally overwhelming.

Here are a few suggestions to help keep Twitter under control

1. If you’re busy or have deadlines to meet, restrict social networking to 10 minute sessions and close down the tab or client when the time is up, so you don’t sneak a look.
2. If a tweet looks interesting, use the ‘Favourite’ toggle and save it to read after work.
3. At the beginning of the week, set up a few tips to tweet automatically (use this very sparingly)
4. Schedule Retweets and spread them out, so they don’t all appear at once
5. Don’t automatically follow people back, and don’t feel obliged to follow back either
6. Use a Twitter Client like Hootsuite, Seesmic or TweetDeck to keep the flow of chatter organised so you don’t miss anything important.

Because I didn’t know any better, my eagerness to be part of the exciting community online meant I didn’t think through a practical strategy to use Twitter.  I just jumped in and made it up as I went along!  However I don’t recommend that approach for you as it will reduce the effectiveness of your overall online marketing efforts and take a lot longer to see results.

Just as you would plan out an offline marketing campaign, it makes sense to take time and plan out in advance how you’re going to take part in social media marketing.

How has Twitter (or another social network) changed your business?  What do you do to keep it under control?  Please share in the comments below (and don’t forget to follow @savvymarketers if you aren’t already )

At our recent Q&A Hour I (Louise) was asked how long I spend networking online each day.  I was pleased to be able to answer that it amounts to around 30 minutes a day, which is no more than attending a local networking meeting in person once a week.  (That time doesn’t include reading blog posts and other articles – perhaps that should be the subject of a future post!)

Finding enough time to network online is a combination of planning ahead, making good use of some of the better automation tools available, as well as applying some self-discipline so that the ‘real’ work doesn’t suffer.

Your social networking plan needs to include deciding which of the networks to join – or where your prospective customers are most likely to be online; how much time you will spend on each one every day, perhaps spreading it out so you visit at different times of the day (I like to visit first thing in the morning, have a quick check-in at lunchtime and spend a little longer chatting in the evening); and it’s also important to determine what your goal is for each period of time you spend there.

While there are several tools you can use to automatically update your status and send out tweets throughout the day, they need to be used with care if you’re to keep your followers paying attention to what you say.  Avoid being carried away by having a plan of what and when you will schedule to go out via the automated tools you’ve chosen.  I do this at the beginning of the week so I can link messages to blog posts and promotions without being too ‘noisy’ online.

Being disciplined so you don’t end up losing large chunks of time is very much down to you, as each person has different tricks and tools that work for them.  A tried and tested way to keep to your planned online networking time is to use an old-fashioned timer with an alarm to let you know when it’s time to move on to the next task on your list.  One online tool you might want to try is http://rescuetime.com which keeps track of everything you do on your computer, including how long you spend on each website!

Social networking is far too important a business tool to ignore, but it needn’t take up any more of your time than you allow it to.  By planning ahead, carefully automating some broadcasts and keeping a tight rein on each online visit, it is possible to fit it all in with your other daily tasks.

Do you have any tips to find time for online networking? Please share if you do

The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer:  Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.

By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?

If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.

A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:

“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk

(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)

You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.

Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.

A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.

It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!

It was useful to talk to local business owners and find out what their challenges are in promoting their businesses online. The main issues that came out for me were that as professional online marketers, we tend to overestimate how much people know as we use the internet day in day out. Most business owners don’t use the internet as much as us as they’re busy doing what they specialise in.

Many people struggle with the jargon as it’s an industry full of jargon! Some people don’t know the difference between organic search results and paid search results. Many owners are more interested in getting their business found locally rather than nationally, many businesses aren’t doing email marketing and the overwhelming issue was having the time to do everything!

We had people attending from a range of organisations such as small e-commerce sites, holiday cottages, driving schools, cleaning products, accountants and financial advisers and even a lady from Chichester Cathedral. All of these organizations will have different needs when planning their online marketing, are targeting a wide range of audiences and probably use the internet in a range of different ways.

Louise and I write our posts weekly to assist small businesses in making the most of online marketing and best practice techniques. However, what we think you need help with may not be the same as what you really want help with, so we’d love to hear what challenges you’re facing. I’ve put together a short poll below (only one answer each) and if you can spare a minute or two, please complete it and we’ll do our best to help you with these issues!

One of the most important things to consider for your website is timing, and how long some activities will take to kick in. Having recently spoken to someone who thought that traffic would somehow dramatically increase with the launch of a new site, it struck me that she hadn’t planned ahead at all, and probably hoped that sales would rocket with a new site before Christmas – this isn’t going to happen.

If you’re planning a new site, then you must think ahead beyond the launch of it to when you might start to see traffic. You’re in a much better position if your site is well-established and you’re planning a re-launch, then you should find traffic bounces back fairly quickly once the search engines index your new site.

If your site’s a new venture, then you must think ahead to when you really need traffic and if you’re relying on Christmas traffic now, then it’s too late unless you pay for your visitors or try other avenues to promote your site.

Many small businesses still fail to think ahead with the timescales involved in seeing results from their website and do no research at all into SEO and internet marketing.

Internet marketing needs to be addressed before the site is even being built, in fact when you start working on your new business idea. Worrying about it once the site is built is far too late.

The online chatter is never-ending, as more and more people find their voices and contribute their expertise and opinions on just about anything under the sun.

Avoiding online overwhelm requires self-discipline, purpose and focus.

• While it is definitely essential to be a part of the social networks, you don’t need to be there 24/7.  Set aside, say, 30 minutes each day to take part in online conversations and be disciplined to stick to it.  Just as you might ration your children’s TV watching – or your chocolate intake – stop when your allocated time is up.
• Your tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts, etc. need to be part of a bigger plan, so it helps to prepare an outline of what you’re going to talk about online.  By incorporating social media tools into your overall marketing strategy a little at a time you’ll find out what works best for your business.
• A common mistake is to sign up or register for every new online network and then do very little to develop your presence (and yes, I am speaking from personal experience here!).  That’s like accepting every breakfast, lunch and evening local networking invitation you receive and just as impossible to fulfil.  Select and join 2 or 3 networks and work to become a part of those online communities.  If you then find you have time and want to join more, at least you’ll understand what’s involved.

How do you avoid online overwhelm?  We’d love to know!

1. Look at your website copy, does it inspire, is it clearly written and to the point? Are there strong calls to action?
2. Do you have up to date testimonials and case studies from clients – this is particularly important for service businesses as these can really help with sales, but of course, whatever you sell, you need testimonials!
3. Can visitors easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for?
4. Are the promises you make on your website true? Don’t say you’ll dispatch items within 24 hours if it takes longer, equally if you can deliver quicker then do so as people expect quick delivery when buying online.
5. Make sure you respond to enquiries and sales questions quickly, slow responses could mean you send prospects to your competitors.
6. Check all the pages of your website work, and you have a 404 page on the site to cover any broken links or pages that have been taken down (we’ve covered this in a previous post and it’s particularly important if you’re planning on re-launching an existing website).
7. Send out an email newsletter regularly to ensure customers and prospects don’t forget about you and remind them of the services you offer and any new services you introduce.
8. Start a blog – search engines love blogs so if you can post regularly, you may soon find them appearing in search results. Make your posts interesting and engaging and you may find you begin to start up conversations with customers and prospects, you never know what it could lead to. Find other blogs to post comments on too.

I’ve worked on many websites over the years and despite increasing traffic and offering advice on ways to increase conversions, some customers don’t seem to see this as important. Search engine optimisation or pay per click alone does not equate to an increase in sales particularly if a website is poorly written. If you’re wondering why your website traffic isn’t producing sales and enquiries, then now is a very good time to look at many of the above points.