Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • Tips for Graphic Designers Starting Out in Indianapolis

    I recently met some recent Ball State graduates at a meetup in Broad Ripple, which led me to write this post on the current state of graphic design from my perspective and how to get noticed online:

    Types of Design Work You Could Do

    • Design book covers – people are self-publishing more (as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks), but they still need graphic design for the cover and possibly for the layout of the books themselves. Ebook platforms like for the Kindle simply use HTML so if you know that, you’re halfway more helpful than the average person. I have some resources for that here.
    • Design custom Facebook pages and Twitter backgrounds – business owners usually know they need to be on Facebook, but don’t always know how or what to makes an effective design. Learning a little bit more about how to get people to click on the like button will help you sell the service. Remember to ‘sell the hole‘, which means to sell the value, not the product.
    • Design materials to match a website design or vice versa – web designers don’t often make print materials and print graphic designers don’t always make web sites, so there is some opportunity to make a business’ brand match by filling in the gap on either side of that equation.
    • Freelance – through sites like Elance, Odesk, Crowdspring, or Vworker. You could also offer your services on Craigslist or Backpage. Some web design and app design firms also hire freelancers for project. Kurtis Beavers has done freelance work for Silver Square (web design) and Expected Behavior (app design), among others, and would be a good example for you.

    Web Design and WordPress Resources

    • Web design websites for best-practices in design: Smashing Magazine and A List Apart.
    • About the business of web design: Get free advice on this forum at Webmaster World.
    • Free WordPress blog: WordPress.com – they have paid versions, but sub-domain versions are free.
    • WordPress Support: WordPress.org – here you will find many resources about all things WordPress.
    • How to get started making custom WordPress themes: this Web Designer Wall article gives good direction for WordPress newbies.
    • Other popular web platforms: Joomla, Drupal, and Sharepoint.

    Indianapolis Web and Graphic Design Firms

    • Alpha Graphics – Carmel – they do traditional print and web graphics as well as social media graphics and social media marketing and SEO.
    • SpinWeb – Keystone at the Crossing – web design and content marketing.
    • Small Box Web – Broad Ripple – web design and online marketing.
    • Slingshot SEO – Keystone at the Crossing – seo consulting.
    • DK New Media – Downtown Indianapolis – all things new media.
    • List of 70 Indianapolis-Area Web Design Firms.

    Indianapolis Meetups

    • Verge Indy – “The hottest startup event in the Midwest”.
    • Indianapolis Marketing – Learn Marketing Strategies Tools and Best Practices for Promoting Your Business Online and Off.
    • WordPress Indianapolis – Learn best practices, ask questions, and get answers on WordPress in Indianapolis.

    Web Hosts and Free Blogging Platforms

    Ways to Promote Your Portfolio Online

    • Pinterest – invite-only, but very popular and growing.
    • Twitter – post pictures in addition to text tweets.
    • Flickr – be social here – treat it like a social network.
    • Dribbble – a Pinterest for designers.
    • Your own blog (SEE above for free blogging tools).
    • Youtube – use software like Jing to show the world what you can do – remember to put a link back to your blog or portfolio in the description. It will turn into a hyperlink and help you with SEO.
    • Vimeo – Anything you post to Youtube, also post here – it won’t hurt you and can only help.
    • Facebook Pages – post pictures on your wall/newsfeed/timeline – it won’t help with SEO, but ‘go where the people are’.

    Lean Methodologies: Product and Customer Development

    Websites to Follow

    • Ramit Sethi – I Will Teach You to Be Rich – advice on freelancing, job interviewing, and saving for retirement while you’re young.
    • Michael Hyatt – advice on the publishing industry and how to build a platform to promote your business and services online.
    • Chris Brogan – advice on social media and how to build a platform.

    Please let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to help.

  • No More Stock Photography

    Recently I’ve noticed from social media experts like Jason Cobb and from Pinterest boards like No More Boring Stock Photos, there is a growing revolt against the use of stock photography.

    Now, I’ve used my share of stock photography in the past from sites like iStockPhoto, but now I’ve got a [quiet] goal of not using any stock photography in my posts going forward. I’d encourage you to think about what strategy you’ll use going forward this year.

    As a general rule, every blog post needs at least one picture.

    Why do blog posts need pictures?

    1) It’s sure dull when you go to post it on Facebook, Digg, Google+, or LinkedIn without it.
    2) It’s another avenue for search engine traffic from Google Image search.
    3) People don’t tend to read articles without them (if it’s not important enough for you to add one, why should they read it?)
    4) It allows other people to pin your work on sites like Pinterest.

    How do you propose getting your images then?

    Take them or make them.

    I’ve been taking photographs with a camera and my phone. I’ve also been sketching things in paint programs. I’ve also been creating things in Visio. It’s harder so if it hinders you from accomplishing other goals or diminishes your brand, don’t do it. It’s just something I’m doing. My thought process is that eventually what I produce will get better over time due to practice and I don’t mind a little egg on my face in the mean time.

  • Customer Development

    In April of 2009, Steve Blank and Eric Ries gave a presentation on Customer Development at a Startup2Startup Conference in Palo Alto, California. They called it The Customer Development Model, which stated that, “More startups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development”.

    But it’s not just startups, more companies fail from a lack of customers than from a lack of a great product, yet most of the time a company forms around a product and then tries to go out and find customers for that product. What if there was a way you could find the customers first, build a product for those customers, and then create a company? There is and it’s called Customer Development.

    Customer Development is a rigorous methodology developed by Steve Blank to bring the scientific method to the typically chaotic, seemingly disorganized startup process. Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, detailed the Customer Development process and his second book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, is a step-by-step guide to building a successful startup, offering practical advice for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.

    According to Steve Blank, Customer Development involves four steps:

    1. Customer Discovery – Create a hypotheses about who your customer might be and then ask those customers what they want, how they work, what they hate, and what they want more of.
    2. Customer Validation – Develop a repeatable and scalable sales process. Only “earlyvangelists” are crazy enough to buy.
    3. Customer Creation – After proof of sales, creation is where you “cross the chasm”. It is a strategy, not a tactic.
    4. Company Building – (Re)build your company’s organization and management. Re-look at your mission.
    Credit: Steve Blank and Eric Ries

    But what if you’ve already started your company and you already have products? You can still use these same methods to find out who your target customer is, what they want, and how they talk in order to create custom marketing directly to them.

    Steve Blank says, that “Customer Development is about testing the founder’s hypothesis about what constitutes product/market fit with the minimum feature set.” What is product/market fit? I would define product/market fit as the moment when the iterations of your product match the desires and needs of a market in a way that the customer would actually be mad at you if you didn’t let them have the product. Once you’ve achieved this state, it’s time to “fuel the engine” as Eric Ries says, and build it fast. This is the moment you’ll want to attract funding and start adding as many customers as possible (Customer Creation) in order to build a company. In this way, the entire company is built around the customer, not the [by]product.

    Customer Discovery

    Customer Discovery involves “getting out of the building” and doing Customer and Solution Interviews. Part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a business model that values learning, these interviews are the best way to find out your customers wants and needs – so that you can solve them. Like Agile methodology, Lean methodology uses iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible.

    What are your customer’s pain points? What are they complaining about? Where do they hang out? What words do they use? It’s only when you know the answers to these questions that you can then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for the solution. The first part of that question is called a Customer Interview.

    Here’s an example of a customer interview:

    You “get out of the building” and meet with a potential customer in your market and ask them what sort of problems they run into on a daily basis. The business owner tells you about having too much spam in their email.

    Now that you know the customer has a problem with too much spam, you create a hypothesis about what product might solve this problem for the customer and set up a second meeting called a Solution Interview to determine what the customer thinks of the solution, if they are willing to pay, and if they are able to pay for it.

    Here’s an example of a solution interview:

    You meet with the customer, present the solution to them, and ask if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced.

    Write down any feedback you get because the point is not to sell the product at this point, the point is to learn as much as you can so you can go back and refine the product to create product/market fit. Even if you can’t change the product, you can still iterate your approach or how you you’re using the product to solve that problem. It could be that your product is a better answer to another problem or that a new product is needed.

    Applying Customer Development and Lean Methodologies to Content Marketing

    Joseph Dager, Lean Marketing consultant and author of Lean Marketing House, says that “Lean Sales and Marketing is about applying Customer Value to the Demand side of your business.”

    If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems. But how do you identify what your customers pain points are? The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

    Content/Market Fit

    We believe that content marketing is the best way to attract customers when marketing online.

    We’ve adapted the customer development process for content marketing and developed a way to create content that achieves a product/market fit that we call content/market fit. We spend more time on content development so that our client’s customers find them. Why? Because the content we develop content that solves a problem for our client’s customers. Whenever they search for the problem they’re having, our client’s solutions are displayed as the answer. In this way, you’re working more in sync with Google’s goals of wanting to deliver the most relevant content to users seeking out answers to their problems.

    We help business bloggers write content that answers their customer’s problems.

    By spending more time finding out what problems your customers are having, you’ll spend less time in the customer creation process and more time making money in the company building process. How can Erich Stauffer help you build your company? Contact us for one hour of free consultation. Just mention this code: CMF.

  • How I Made it as an Entrepreneur

    I got this email from an old friend today and wanted to post my reply to him:

    So how are things at Watershawl these days? You still able to make a living off of it all? I’m pretty anxious to hear all about what you’ve got going on these days. It seems like you’ve been away for a while now… it was sink or swim time and you swam!

    I’ve got that itch again. You know the one where I want to make money my way. I won’t lie they really take care of me there, and I’m learning tons every single day, but I’m starting to read blogs about making money from home and what not again. And it reminded me that I haven’t checked in with you for a while on where you’re at.

    Take Care,

    Jake

    My experience at Watershawl can best be described by the attached picture, but yes, I’m able to make a living off of it. The issues I have are not unique to my business though and that’s cash-flow (you know, the stuff the Cash Management guys talk about all the time). What that means is that although I make enough over time, it doesn’t always come in at the same rate I need it to go out for bills. In other words, it averages out alright, but isn’t always timed right. For example, this month I’m scheduled to make a $400 profit over my bills (something that never hardly happened when I had a normal job), but right now I don’t have anything. It’s like that pretty much every month and that’s because I didn’t have a savings account (and still don’t).

    I don’t think the itch to leave will ever really go away (unless you die inside), but there are ways to test the waters before you jump in. First of all, start thinking of your job as your biggest client and try to stop ‘expecting’ a paycheck and start trying to ‘earn’ a paycheck. This will put you in the mindset you’ll need when dealing with clients outside of a employee relationship. When I left I had 1 boss, but now I have over 20 (the number of current clients). My time is not my own. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. I have to work for them just like I had to work for my old job. The difference is that if I work more, I get more (and I can charge more). I also get to sleep in and do whatever I want. 🙂

    My recommendation to you would be to take advantage of where you’re at and LISTEN to what people are saying. What I mean by this is if you can start to hear what people’s problems are, stuff they complain about, and/or what their pain points are, that’s the beginning of discovering a product, service, or business that you could start in order to solve that need. You’re in a better position in some ways than I am for finding out that information. I would love to find out what problems commercial loan officers have or what problems their clients have. If you can find a problem that you can solve + a customer that is both willing and able to pay for that solution, you have a business idea.

    The key is to iterate your business idea until you have what’s called a product/market fit. Eric Ries talks about this in his book, Lean Startups, but you can also read Steve Blank‘s work on it. They’ve worked together so they have similar ideas. But basically, the premise is to 1) discover a problem 2) hypothesize a solution 3) interview potential customers about the solution 4) refine the solution. Once you get to a product that the customer would be MAD at you if you took away from them, you have a product/market fit and then you get funding and build like crazy. There are other subtle variations (like starting with a product instead of a customer), but being customer-centric in everything you do will pay dividends.

    One idea that I don’t mind sharing with you is a “LED light bulb replacement service” where you go to a company like a bank and say, “I’d like to save you 40% off your lighting bill and would be happy to show you how it works by converting one of your branches to LED lighting at cost – if you like it, we’ll do the rest of your branches too, if not, we’ll go on our way and thank you for your time.” Essentially, you’re going in, finding out how many bulbs they have, estimating the cost upfront and the cost savings, and then swapping them out in one day. You can even do a buy-back on existing fluorescent light bulbs that you can either trash or sell to someone else.

    A typical day for me is waking up around 8, checking my email for emergency work, working on some projects for customers (usually web edits), reading up on subjects in my field, visit a customer at their location or at a restaurant for a meeting, attend a networking meeting or meetup at night, and then in bed by midnight. I recently joined a networking group called BNI and am active on Meetup.com. I run my own group called Indianapolis Marketing and attend several others as well as Tech Point meetings, which are put on by a partnership with the State of Indiana. I use blogging to content market online, but that’s less successful than in-person networking for me. I’d be interested in hearing what you’re working on at work or in your ‘spare time’.

  • How to Start Making Money on the Side

    Recently a former co-worker and friend asked me about how I started making money on the side:

    I’ve toyed around with a lot of ideas around how to start making money on the side and how to then move from that being side income to my main source of income, but I haven’t pursued anything too closely. I’ve actually picked up a huge work load in applications support at my day job. I’m now the primary support person for items processing, online banking, telephone banking, the company Intranet, the new auto-dialer, all instances of Sugar CRM ( we currently have 3), the online survey tool, the online enrollment tool, and last but not least I’m the main IT contact for the website. So things got really hectic for me, but I’ve realized that if I let myself get lost in that chaos it will only become harder to start making income on the side. For now I’m learning PHP and MySQL and hosting a website using Apache so that I can hopefully branch off and do some freelance work.

    So you’re making more working for yourself than you did at your day job?

    Yes, I’m able to make a living off of doing web design and IT consulting full-time as an independent contractor. The issues I have are not unique to my business though and that’s managing cash-flow. What that means is that although I make enough over time, it doesn’t always come in at the same rate I need it to go out for bills. In other words, it averages out alright, but isn’t always timed right. For example, this month I’m scheduled to make a $400 profit over my bills (something that never hardly happened when I was at my day job), but right now I don’t have anything. It’s like that pretty much every month and that’s because I didn’t have a savings account when I quit and I still don’t. (EDIT: I do now.)

    I don’t think the itch to leave will ever really go away (unless you die inside), but there are ways to test the waters before you jump in. First of all, start thinking of your day job as your biggest client and try to stop ‘expecting’ a paycheck and start trying to ‘earn’ a paycheck. This will put you in the mindset you’ll need when dealing with clients outside of a employee relationship. When I left I had one boss, but now I have over 20 (the number of current clients). My time is not my own. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. I have to work for them just like I had to work for my past employer. The difference is that if I work more, I get more (and I can charge more). I also get to sleep in and do whatever I want. 🙂

    My recommendation to you would be to take advantage of where you’re at and LISTEN to what people are saying. What I mean by this is if you can start to hear what people’s problems are, stuff they complain about, and/or what their pain points are, that’s the beginning of discovering a product, service, or business that you could start in order to solve that need. You’re in a better position in some ways than I am for finding out that information. I would love to find out what problems commercial loan officers have or what problems their clients have. If you can find a problem that you can solve + a customer that is both willing and able to pay for that solution, you have a business idea. This is called customer development.

    The key is to iterate your business idea until you have what’s called a product/market fit. Eric Ries talks about this in his book, Lean Startups, but you can also read Steve Blank’s work on it. They’ve worked together so they have similar ideas. But basically, the premise is to 1) discover a problem 2) hypothesize a solution 3) interview potential customers about the solution 4) refine the solution. Once you get to a product that the customer would be MAD at you if you took away from them, you have a product/market fit and then you get funding and build like crazy. There are other subtle variations (like starting with a product instead of a customer), but being customer-centric in everything you do will pay dividends.

    One business idea that I don’t mind sharing with you is a “LED light bulb replacement service” where you go to a company like First Merchants and say, “I’d like to save you 40% off your lighting bill and would be happy to show you how it works by converting one of your branches to LED lighting at cost – if you like it, we’ll do the rest of your branches too, if not, we’ll go on our way and thank you for your time.” Essentially, you’re going in, finding out how many bulbs they have, estimating the cost upfront and the cost savings, and then swapping them out in one day. You can even do a buy-back on existing fluorescent light bulbs that you can either trash or sell to someone else. A similar idea is to paint their roofs white.

    A typical day for me is waking up around 8, checking my email for emergency work, working on some projects for customers (usually web edits), reading up on subjects in my field, visit a customer at their location or at a restaurant for a meeting, attend a networking meeting or meetup at night, and then in bed by midnight. I recently joined a networking group called BNI and am active on Meetup.com. I run my own group called Indianapolis Marketing and attend several others as well as Tech Point meetings, which are put on by the State of Indiana. I use blogging to content market online, but that’s less successful than in-person networking for me. I’d be interested in hearing what you’re working on at work or in your ‘spare time’.

    I know you sell your skills at SEO out to companies but I wasn’t sure if you were still scooping up domain names and putting content with ads up or not. Right now I have a few ideas that I’m going to try to do some research on what kind of market might be out there for these services and if it’s something I could/should pursue. For starters I’d like to design an app. In my head I could see where small companies would really enjoy and benefit from having someone build an app for them. I’d also still really enjoy designing a “portal” similar to what our company Intranet offers, but better on every level. Another thing similar to this is I’d like to design a workflow creator tool. The one inside our company Intranet is completely flawed and my employer began hunting for an outside tool to buy to fill this need. I also am looking at starting a few different blogs around things I’m passionate about such as weight loss, video games, “manly skills”, and adventure. I’m sure to really gain profit from these areas I’d have to really pin point a specific something inside of those categories but currently I’m just looking for experience. Once I see the possibility I think I could really define it more.

    Do you still do the blog for money stuff?

    I’m really glad they’ve plugged you in and are using you so much at your day job. The opposite of that is brutal and part of the reason I left. They weren’t using me at all and I had nothing to do. Let me tell you from experience applying at other jobs and learning what I’ve been learning over the last 6 months that any and all programming knowledge is the key to the future in the workplace. Make sure you’re learning as much as you can about PHP, SQL, and how to manipulate and query databases. The trends are all going towards software programming, big data analysis, and cloud computing. You’re in a good spot now, but you may be able to take what you’re learning and be more valuable elsewhere. That’s usually the only way to actually get a real ‘raise’.

    I still have blogs that make me money, but it’s not my primary income and while it seems like ‘passive’ income, it’s really not. If I don’t keep writing and backlinking, the blogs stop making any real money after about a month of non-activity. That’s why it’s so important for businesses to have a blog and a strong social media presence because if they don’t, they don’t show up in Google where they need to. Think about it, there are so many websites out there now that Google can’t possibly keep them all at the top – so they favor the ones with fresh content. This applies to small businesses, blogs, or anything else online. Let me give you a real-world example:

    I had a blog that was making $25 in October, but I wrote like crazy all of November and December. By the end of December, I made $600 from that blog, but after not writing anything for January and February, it’s back to $25. Now some of that was Christmas traffic, but it’s happening across all of my blogs. Unless I write on them and keep them relevant, they aren’t relevant. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of money to be made in blogs, but you have to do the same thing I told you with starting out a business. You have to find real problems people are having with the product, write to those problems with how your affiliate products are the answer – and the people will come. It’s still work though.

    The best thing you can do is to just do something. You’re not going to get good at it until you try and fail. It’s okay to fail, it’s how you learn. I have way more blogs that failed when I first started, but I started two new blogs in December that now equal my top site. I learned from all of my mistakes and can now do it better, faster. As far as apps go, I don’t want to discourage you from trying, but there are some big learning curves and substantial marketing issues to overcome in the marketplace once you’ve made one. My advice there is to pick a platform, make a simple program, then make iterations of the program, making it do more and more or do a different programs over time, learning as you go. You can actually use your apps as a platform to market your new app releases, meaning your best app should probably be your tenth app (and it makes sense that it would be that way anyway).

    I make more net now than I did “net” at my day job, but while my schedule is different, it’s sometimes twice the work. That’s because when you run your own business you have to work to get the business, and then you have to work to do the business so it’s almost double the work. At my past employer, the work came to me so half of the work was already done. I didn’t have to run an internal marketing campaign around the company asking for work and specifying why I should be the one to do it. Although, come to think of it, I probably should have. It would have riled a lot of feathers, but it strikes me as a better way to live within an organization. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll figure out what you want to do, but remember to enjoy the moments you have. Enjoy your family, and such.

  • Exposing Hidden Benefits

    Offering Additional Benefits to Your Employees Doesn’t Have to Cost Your Business

    Your company may not be able to offer all of the types of insurance benefits that are available, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make them available to your employees. Did you know that there are companies that can offer additional insurance benefits to your employees at no cost to your business? That’s exactly what Ruth Plant does for companies through Colonial Life in Indiana.

    Ruth Plant of Colonial Life
    Ruth has been involved in insurance her entire career. She now runs a team of 25 associates who help companies with benefit enrollment, counseling employees about insurance products, and interfacing with the insurance companies. Through Colonial Life and proprietary online tools like Harmony, the enrollment process is paperless and as pain-free as possible.

    Online tools also allow employees who opt for supplemental benefits to have their own login to check their policies online. One example of a supplemental benefit is called “Hospital Confinement”, which can help pay your hospital deductible should you find yourself hospitalized for any reason. Ruth works with clients on a one-on-one basis and “every client has different needs.”

    “What a lot of people don’t realize is that this service is free to the employer and optional to employees,” Ruth and her team of professional benefit counselors help employers and employees by identifying strategies to ease the pain of the high cost of health insurance. Ruth explained, “We spend about 30 minutes with each employee explaining the benefits the employer provides then helps identify any gaps in their benefit package. My clients depend on me to make sure they won’t run out of money when they need it most.”

    We asked Ruth what she likes to do when she’s not helping companies provide more benefits to their employees and she said she likes to travel. She’s visited her daughter in Germany, but now that she’s moved to Hawaii she can’t wait to visit her there. To have Ruth visit your company to find out how you can offer more benefits to your employees, call 317-244-6600, or email: ruth.plant@coloniallife.com

  • WordPress eCommerce Plugin: Error Detected, Your shopping cart is empty

    If you’re using WP e-Commerce to turn your WordPress website into an online shopping cart, you may have ran into a Paypal error that says, “Error Detected, Your shopping cart is empty.”

    This can happen when you’re trying to pass a required field like “Name” over to Paypal, but it’s blank. Why would it be blank? Because one of the fields in the Product page that Paypal needs to process the order is empty. It can happen when you start to add variations to an item, but you don’t name the variations.

    You need to put in a name in the “Name” field under the “Variations” under each product in the Dashboard. Once you do that, that Name is what is sent to Paypal during the checkout process. It doesn’t work without that.

    You can tell which product have variations by looking at the “Stock” category in the Dashboard > Product page. If the variations are turned on, it will show “0~”, other wise it will show “NA”. Once you go in to edit an individual product, you’ll see a “Variations” module. If the “Sizes” is checked, the “Name” field has to be filled in for it to work.

    All products with variations need the name field filled in, in order to pass that name to Paypal.

    If this doesn’t fix your problem, try one of these references instead:

    http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-standard-2/
    http://gallery.menalto.com/node/91326
    http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-shopping-cart-is-empty-error-detected/
    http://quirm.net/forum/topic.php?id=4376
    http://www.webassist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19706
    http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-error-detected-your-shopping-cart-is-empty/

  • Paid Advertising with Google AdWords

    Google AdWords

    One of the things that can really help get your website traffic fast is paid advertising.

    We recently helped an Indianapolis dentist get started with paid advertising from Google AdWords. We came up with a marketing plan together and created a budget. We were able to use input from the client and data from Google Analytics to know what people had been searching for and finding them in the past. Basically, we wanted to amplify and expedite what the site was already doing well through content marketing and SEO.

    We setup a campaign for the metropolitan area of Indianapolis, funded it with an initial payment, and setup 6 different ads so we could test to see which one was more effective. We plan on revisiting this over the next couple of days to see which ones were more popular and possibly add new ones. The ads usually take a little under a day to start showing up. This is because of an initial approval process by Google and for time for the payment to process.

    Bid Per Call

    One recently new feature (added in 2011) is a bid-per-call feature that allows you to bid for phone calls, in addition to bidding for clicks, when you show Google search ads on computers and tablets. According to Google, both your max bid per click (max CPC bid) and max cost-per-call bid (max CPP bid) can influence your ad’s position on the results page. You can increase your ad position and drive more phone calls to your business by setting a bid that is equal to or greater than the $1 minimum call fee.

    Bid-per-call requires you to use a Google forwarding number when you activate call extensions. It provides detailed call reporting, so you can have a better sense of the value of calls and clicks your campaigns are generating.

    With bid-per-call, the maximum cost-per-call (CPP) and your call Quality Score will be factored into your Ad Rank. This means that you’ll automatically be rewarded with higher ad position and lower cost per call when your phone number is useful to users. And you’ll have increased control over the position of your ads and your call volume by adjusting your bid. As always, you’ll never pay more than you’re willing to for either a phone call or a click.

  • Google+ for Business

    Pages for Google+

    Different people are interested in different parts of your business. Whether it’s breaking news, updates, promotions, links, photos – even talking face-to-face with groups via easy-to-use video chat – Google+ lets you easily share the right things with the right customers. And unlike Facebook, Pages for Google+ can actually help your SEO efforts.

    Google advocates putting the +1 button anywhere you’d like people to be able to recommend your business, products or services to friends and contacts all across the web. Google+ makes it easy to learn more about how your followers’ interactions on your page affect your brand, and your business.

    We’ve been testing Pages for Google+ for a couple of months now. We ran into one instance where we couldn’t add more pages for our customers, but we found that we were just in a waiting period before being able to add more. This is probably a built-in protection against spamming.

    Need help setting up your Google+ Page for your business? We can help.

    About Google+

    Google+, the search giant’s new social network and answer to Facebook features a new friend list function called “circles”, which has been very positive overall. Users have commented that it’s the easiest system on the market for putting friends into groups, making it easier to share posts with just your business colleagues or your family. We are really interested in the circles option, but it needs more people on there so it doesn’t die like Google Buzz. We like the idea of circles and the integrated video chat/hangout function. They’re not really inventing anything new, just putting things like Facebook groups and Skype-like chat front and center. It becomes a more cozy place to hang out online. Facebook will start to look more stuck up and sterile over time, the same way MySpace started to look more trashy.

    We have noticed there are less people requesting to be friends and less friend requests being answered. We think Facebook peaked in 2009 and started to decline after that. But even though numbers are down, they are still number one, for now. It has to do with elasticity, which used in this context means peoples ability to want and except change. In the beginning, when things are new, people are more lenient and will try new things, but over time, ideas harden and change becomes harder. It works with friendships, departments, new businesses, and even social networks. We’ve got high hopes for Google’s inventiveness. The on-demand video chat feature called “Hangouts” is a great idea. Considering it’s 2011, We’re suprised that’s not a feature that we take for granted already.