Wouldn’t it be nice not to have sticky notes with important passwords scribbled on them lying by your desk or hanging on your monitor in plain sight? Wouldn’t it be convenient to have access to your documents or reports or messages from clients without having to traverse through your infinitely long email folders?

Similarly, wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to work from your office, your comfy couch at home, or a nearby coffee shop, or better yet, your daughter’s ballet class?

The Good Old Days

Coming from an academic background, I was used to having to carry around passwords in a KeePass folder or remembering to upload the latest version of the MS Project folder if I needed to work from home. Or, uploading all working documents to the intranet before logging out for the day.

In the last few months I have been at Pure Visibility, my routines and processes have changed quite drastically. And, for the better, I must say.

Now: Pure Visibility Project Management

At Pure Visibility, we use a variety of different cloud computing tools on a daily basis. Here are our favorites.

Basecamp

Even though it initially felt like several things to recall every time I did my project management tasks, now it is like second nature and I wonder if I know any other way at all! Messages from team members and clients are safely stored on Basecamp, a convenient tool that helps me sift through my emails and ensures that our team has one place to access message threads, reports, documents, milestones, or you name it, pertaining to client requests.

MailManagr

Do you have really long message threads with attachments that need to be distributed to your team as well as archived? No worries – use MailManagr, and it doesn’t mess up the file formats and the syntax is quite intuitive.

Socialtext

Our wiki, Socialtext, is where we store our internal procedures, policies, operations information, and everything else useful to us in our daily work. Having a wiki keeps everything centrally located and it’s very easy to add, edit, and delete information; and, to train new team members!

LastPass

Passwords, as we all know, are not only sensitive data but ever-changing to ensure the continued security of systems. The latter making it quite taxing for teams to keep in sync with the IT folks, and may result in major inconveniences at off-site meetings if a system is not available as soon as the password is changed. LastPass to the rescue – not only can you access this without having to carry a jump-drive with KeePass or other local programs, now, we can use the cloud to distribute it on the fly.

Harvest

Need to log billable time on a daily basis, Harvest, an online time tracking and invoicing system helps us switch from projects/tasks with an easy to use interface and multiple customizable options. Indeed, creating projects and sub-projects along with discipline tasks is a breeze, thus helping us keep this application in sync with our internal Basecamp and Wiki.

Expensify

Meeting your clients in person at their office or stepping out for a quick coffee to catch up with your team? You know these expenses add up and at the end of the month filling out expense reports to get reimbursed can be cumbersome, and quite frankly, off-putting. Well, it’s not if you have Expensify, this nifty program is available online bundled with a convenient app for smartphones.

Click a photo of the receipt and upload it using your phone, or scan and upload receipts to the website. It’s even conveniently linked up to our company credit cards and assembles our credit charges, too. Our set-up is quite fancy, in that managers can approve team members’ expenses online as well. Better yet, it will send reminders to managers for approvals to ensure we meet our company deadlines. No more excuses to submit or approve expense reports now, is there?

Salesforce.com

To acquaint myself with our clients, I used the Wiki, Basecamp, project documentation, and reports but another invaluable resource is our CRM, Salesforce.com. It gives me on-the-fly access to ever-changing client details like contact information, titles, and accounts information. And, it is a great way to log information on our prospective clients as well, such as emails, phone calls, and sales details. So, the communication thread is easily available and sorted to help any (new) team member catch up at any time during the sales cycle.

Google Documents

Google Documents is a wonderful collaborative tool that we use not only internally to share documents or spreadsheets by multiple team members; but it has become a lifesaver for client collaboration tasks as well. Whether sharing budget forecasts, time planning, tasks distribution, and even for social purposes like emergency phone numbers to go out for a cup of coffee!

WebEx

Another neat program I’m familiar with these days is WebEx, which is an online web conferencing solution. Ideally, we’d love to be able to meet in person every time but we all know how difficult that can be, however with Webex’s phone and chat options as well as the ability to share screens among participants, we are a step closer to achieving the face-to-face time.

All I can say is: at the end of the day, I don’t carry a bunch of paper documents; or a special drive with passwords; or slips of paper with my daily time sheet; or wads of receipts to submit my expenses. I just pack up my laptop and I am off to continue work wherever I please.

Well, almost anywhere I please, that is—as I sit precariously on this particular ledge balancing my laptop on one leg and looking for a wireless signal at my daughter’s dance studio! Nevertheless, I enjoy the convenience of the cloud for project management work, as well as the comfort of knowing I didn’t forget something important on my desk, or worse, somewhere else!

It’s not too early to get involved in one of Michigan’s coolest events for passionate people-entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, designers.

• TEDxDetroit, the third annual assembly of sharing positive ideas for the world from Detroit
• Wednesday, September 28, 2011
• 8 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Orchestra Hall at the Max M Fisher Music Center (3711 Woodward) near the campus of Wayne State
• $26 donation per person, lunch provided

Interested in speaking, sharing your ideas? Speaker Application
Want to attend and see what it’s all about? Attendee Application
Would you like to financially support the event? Sponsor E-mail
Can you support the event with your time? Volunteer Application
Everyone can participate by spreading the word. Share, tweet, blog and update about this event with your network!

Check out Pure Visibility’s own Catherine Juon on YouTube! She recently attended the first ever International Small Giants Community Summit. Hosted in Konstanz, Germany, Catherine was one of 45 attendees from 12 different countries who spent 3 days in 1 room sharing business ideas with like-minded entrepreneurs.

The Small Giants Community is made up of small business leaders who focus on their employees and community, not just the company bottom line. It’s a place where business owners can share their passions with each other and learn about what makes each other thrive.

As part of this community, Catherine strongly believes that this is core to why Pure Visibility has been successful. It’s why clients trust that the tools they employ will help their SEM strategy. And it’s why the staff loves coming to work each day.

In a recent interview with Michigan Entrepreneur, Pure Visibility co-founders Linda Girard and Catherine Juon shared their secrets for business success.  Citing a responsibility to both clients and their team as key drivers of continued growth, the Pure Visibility leaders offered a business model that other entrepreneurs could follow.

Girard described the company’s business as focused squarely on Internet search marketing.  As the company has evolved over the past six years, so has its client base from smaller companies to global brands.  In a competitive market, Pure Visibility credits its distinct focus on metrics for helping it stand out from the competition.

“Our responsibility and accountability for our clients’ sales is a key difference between Pure Visibility and others (in the search marketing industry),” said Girard.  “Our attention to metrics makes Pure Visibility stand out.”

Internally, Juon explained that Pure Visibility’s culture is what helps the company attract the best and brightest talent.  From quarterly charity events that serve as a way for the team to celebrate reaching quarterly goals and milestones to daily stand ups where the team shares successes or asks for assistance, Pure Visibility’s culture is another way the company continues to outpace competitors.

Michigan Entrepreneur airs on various channels in Oakland County.  Check the program listings for a program schedule and other info.

At the Inc. Growco conference last week we had many, many conversations about the best ways to set up websites. As a general rule of thumb, here’s a rundown on a few of the platforms commonly mentioned.

WordPress
We love WordPress – it’s easy out-of-the box if you want to start a simple site (with many templates to choose from or buy at a small fee) and upgrade to a custom-designed template later. It’s highly customizable for SEO, and imposes a structure that naturally leads you toward good search engine optimization tactics from the start. It’s flexible enough to manage small and large sites alike, and offers many plug-ins that extend functionality without the need for expensive custom programming. One of the factors that makes WordPress particularly “safe” for entrepreneurs is their large developer community – you will never be at a loss to find someone who can pick up where your last developer left off. Most unbelievably, it’s free – music to the ears of most entrepreneurs!

Drupal
We love Drupal, too! With the launch of Drupal Gardens, you no longer need a hard-core programmer to start using Drupal, making it an option for companies just starting out. We’d generally recommend WordPress unless there was a specific feature of Drupal you needed, just because of the larger development community with WordPress (for now). One of the features that distinguishes Drupal is its ability to manage permissions – giving specific people or departments access to different parts of your website. Along these lines, it also handles workflow management / approvals far more naturally than WordPress. Generally, it’s more extensible than WordPress, making it a great tool to create sophisticated websites while maintaining easy-to-edit content.

Squarespace
Squarespace looks promising, but as a newer entry, it’s unclear what their claim to fame will be. Some of the SEO features require upgrades, and it’s simply too new to have the same kind of following WordPress or Drupal enjoy. However, if you know of a feature that makes Squarespace unique please let us know in the comments – we’d love to hear about it!

We were excited to see Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Rework. In it they share some of their iconoclastic, iterative, and wholehearted approach to doing business.

The book reflects their clean design sensibility, with pages of drawings interspersed with quick blog-post-like narrative snippets. It is a quick read, but worth contemplating. I’ll summarize the book by sharing some of the subtopics titles within a few key chapters.

Given my day job as a project manager, I particularly value their approach to creative productivity. They’re minimalists. They advocate reducing interruptions “interruption is the enemy of productivity” and reducing time in meetings “meetings are toxic”. Why? Because “inspiration is perishable.” So you have to get the dross out of the way to be able to act.

Other recommendations they emphasize quick iterations “good enough is fine”, “quick wins”, and “make tiny decisions”, and being realistic about your human-ness “go to sleep”, “long lists don’t get done”, and “don’t be a hero”.

Want some quick inspiration? Go get Rework!

We created a Pure Visibility Bookshelf (Amazon Associates Link) to share the books we use and often recommend. We’re voracious readers so the list will surely grow – this “starter” list represents some of our all time favorites and current reads.

On Entrepreneurship
MASTERING THE ROCKEFELLER HABITS: This book is our handbook for being – we follow the one page plan, hold quarterly meetings, daily standups, etc. This is the closest thing to a how-to manual for business we’ve seen.

SMALL GIANTS: If you believe that business has a higher purpose than just making money, this book is for you. Bo does a great job of presenting his research on really neat companies and the common threads that make them Small Giants.

THE KNACK: I wish I’d had this book starting out in business. You, too, can have the knack and Bo and Norm are great teachers to learn it from!

THE E-MYTH: Perhaps “the” classic for any new entrepreneur growing from a team of 1 to 1+. This book created the mantra “Work ON the business, not just IN the business.”

GOOD TO GREAT: Jim Collins has done an amazing amount of research on successful businesses (publicly held ones, because there’s more data accessible to analyze) and found some incredible similarities. You’ll hear the phrases he’s coined in Rockefeller Habits and elsewhere such as the “Hedgehog concept” and “Get the right people on the bus”.

Corporate Culture
STRENGTHS FINDER: Way more than a book, this includes an online survey that provides an assessment of strengths. Once you’ve completed the survey you’ll get tips for supporting those strengths personally, as teammates, and as leaders. Buy this for your whole team. (We did!)

DELIVERING HAPPINESS: This book by Zappo’s CEO makes a nice complement to Small Giants, focusing on how creating a happy corporate culture leads to happy clients and a happy bottom line.

REWORK: The focus of the founders of 37Signals on keeping things simple is refreshing. Even the book is simple – you can polish it off in an afternoon. (We also love their project management tool, Basecamp.)

GUIDE TO GIVING GREAT SERVICE: Zingerman’s wrote the book on great service – both figuratively and literally. Personally, I’d recommend checking out their service (and the food) first hand. And while you’re in Ann Arbor, stop by and say hi!

DRIVE: Daniel Pink’s research flies in the face of conventional wisdom about carrots and sticks, making this a must read. (And if you’ve got a teenager at home, this book will prove to be priceless.)

Selling Online
TRUST AGENTS: Chris’s book is the most comprehensive primer I’ve seen on what makes online marketing “tick”. The focus is largely on social media, but it’ll get you on the right track.

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: This book wasn’t written to be about selling online, but the message couldn’t be more relevant. Understanding buying behavior is critical to selling online. As someone once explained to me, if consumers strictly chose rationally, no one would carry American Express (higher fees, used in fewer places, etc.) This book puts research you can use behind why we make those choices.

Getting Visible
SEARCH ENGINE INC: To sell anything online, you’ve first got to get in front of the right people. This 400 page book is the most comprehensive reference to the mechanics of search engine marketing you’ll find.

SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY: Back in the day when we were answering questions at networking meetings like “What’s a Google”? Shari wrote what must have been one of the first books on search engine marketing. This 2nd edition of her original is still a good primer on visibility.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION: This book bridges a lot of categories, with about half of it dedicated to making your site visible. We’re a bit biased about the quality of this book, given that we contributed the two chapters on paid search. That said, if you’re just getting started we’d recommend the books above first – this is definitely a technical read.

Websites That Work
DON’T MAKE ME THINK: This classic came out when I was designing my first websites, and the general principles in it remain just as true today. Generally speaking, the simpler it is to make a transaction on your site (e-commerce or otherwise) the more results you’ll generate from your site.

WEB ANALYTICS 2.0: If Avinash writes it – read it. He believes passionately in the power of data to transform marketing – as we do! The bulk of our work these days is collecting data and making the case for site changes that ultimately help users and drive bottom line results. It’s a big, huge deal and most of your competitors aren’t paying attention to these kinds of details. THIS is how you create competitive advantage in today’s online world.

And that’s the perfect book to close out this initial list with, given that it captures the essence of what we love about online marketing!

P.S. In full disclosure: If you purchase any of these books through our store, the bookworms among us thank you – you’ll be fueling our reading and book sharing fund. Thanks!

As fellow entrepreneurs, Linda and I are often meeting with friends and colleagues looking for the best way to get started with a new website. And the great news is, today’s tools for building websites are remarkable equalizers. Here are a few of our favorite tips and tools, written with entrepreneurs in mind. If you’re a large corporation in a competitive space, your “to-do” list will be more complex. However, many general principles apply across sites of all sizes.

Be Findable
The easiest way to be findable as an entrepreneur on a limited budget is to use tools designed from the ground up to be easily read by search engines such as Google. WordPress is a great choice here. You can start with a freebie version and customize things along the way as you have budget and time. Yes, there are other similar tools – although comparing them is a job for another article. Trust us when we say that few platforms have a vibrant community of coders and designers that support them like WordPress, so among other advantages, it’s simply going to be easier to find people to help you when you adopt a mainstream platform.

Keep Your Design Simple
Because we’re a little biased toward making sure you’re findable, we’re going to encourage you to focus on content and moving forward with the simplest design possible. Save your energy for the content. Custom design is awesome and great, and we love our design friends and we want you to keep them busy! We also want you to get started as efficiently as possible, to which end you may consider starting with a ready-made WordPress theme. More than a simple template, themes allow you to customize many aspects of a site formerly left to true coders.

Did We Mention Content?
Being findable is all about having content on your site that your target audience will be searching for. This requires understanding the language of your target audience, as well as having some volume of content that fits that audience. Building your site in a framework such as WordPress encourages blogging/content generation, and blogging naturally adds a diversity of keywords and keyphrases to your site. Even blogging once a week is enough to make a difference, and as you add new content, you’ll find that your site is found for a wider variety of searches – without having to pay to show up in search. There’s a lot of nuances we’re skipping here, but none of them matter if you’re not generating content in the first place. Writing is your secret weapon. If it’s not your bag, hire a copywriter to interview you and write articles. It’ll be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Include A Call to Action
What’s a call to action, you might ask? Just conjure up an old Billy Mays ad: “Call Now!” “Order in the next 15 minutes, and get a second one a free!” etc. If you’re bothering to attract someone to your site, you need to know what you want them to do when they get there. That’s your call to action. Make it clear. Make it big. Make it bold. Just like Billy.

Measure!
When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to say that you’ll know when this is all working because the phone will ring. While true, that’s a lagging indicator that doesn’t provide sufficient feedback to guide systematic improvements to your site. To gather that data, there are two free tools every site needs: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. There are others, but if you’re only going to do two, start with these.

In addition to installing those tools (start collecting data now, even if you don’t plan on using it right away) we recommend measuring a couple more things:

• Track phone calls. Eliminate guessing. Know exactly which phone calls came from the web. One of our favorites tools for phone tracking is Mongoose Metrics, which scales nicely from a single phone number designed to track all web leads, to enterprise class solutions with staggering numbers of unique phone numbers and sophisticated tracking that integrates with other systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
• Use contact forms. Avoid using simple email/mailto links like the plague. Use a contact form to collect information – just enough information and no more. In the early days, chances are you would prefer to follow up and ask a few more questions than risk losing the lead because the form scared a prospect away. And if at all possible, make sure the contact form flows automatically into some sort of customer database / CRM tool. With tools like salesforce.com this is cheap and easy even for small organizations. And it’s a lot easier to implement when you’re still small. Do it now.

While this list may not sound very “SEOy”, that’s the ironic thing about how Search Engine Optimization has evolved. It used to be about title tags and such, but these days those tactics are often just the cost of entry. It you want to turn your website into Your Online Sales Engine, you’ll need more than the “traditional” SEO tactics – you’ll eventually need to build a system like the one we’ve outlined here.

Keep us posted on your progress – we can’t wait to hear your results!!

I am frequently asked about online tools for managing event registrations, so this time I dug up an analysis Mark wrote while evaluating which tool we would use here at Pure Visibility. It’s not an exhaustive list; rather, we focused on some of the most inexpensive event management services and the major points of differentiation between them.

Eventbrite
We chose Eventbrite because there is no charge for free events (like our Donuts & Search Engine Marketing) and they charge 2.5% of the ticket price for paid events with a maximum charge of $9.95. They recently implemented a survey feature which is convenient, and they also allow you to accept many types of payment methods. They allow a little bit of customization to the event page for your event and they offer many different ways to promote your events (feeds, buttons, etc.) They offer good reporting features, the ability to print name badges, and the ability to offer discounts.

Brown Paper Tickets
This is a free solution that allows you to set up a page on the Brown Paper Ticket site where you can post events and links to your site. You cannot actually sell tickets through the site; they use a 3rd party which charges the same fee as Eventbrite (2.5%). Eventbrite is more of an all in one solution whereas this site is more like a Craigslist for events.

RegOnline
RegOnline appears to be a good tool, but they charge no matter what type of event you are hosting (free or paid events.) $4.75 per registrant for events under 120 attendees, and $3.50 per registrant plus $150 for events with more than 120 attendees. There is also a charge to accept credit card payments. It appears that they offer more customization and support with registration forms/event webpage; they allow you to print name badges, and have some good reporting features. It has many of the same features as Eventbrite, but the price point made Eventbrite win out.

I would like to point you to a favorite article on the topic of Facebook vs. LinkedIn, but after browsing a couple pages of Google results I’m here writing because there was a disappointing amount of industry-centric commentary. We’ve got A-List bloggers scorning one or both systems (hardly a “use case” or fair comparison for the average business person); pundits debating which network will succeed, and scenarios describing the use of these systems in getting (and unintentionally losing) jobs, etc.

While all of that analysis has its place, what do Facebook and LinkedIn offer to the average business person? Here’s my “elevator pitch” answer…

LinkedIn
If you’ve got a business card or a resume, you need to be on LinkedIn. It’s a tool for sharing professional recommendations, which means you belong here if you’re working on growing your business or your professional network. Period.

Facebook
If you want to get back in touch with your buddies from college and high school, join FaceBook. That’s what it was designed for, and what it still does best.

For a little more detail on both LinkedIn and Facebook, read on: Read More