Category: Tips

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Google’s Instant Search Results

This past week Google announced that its search results would be instantaneous. Meaning specifically that indexing the web every week or every month just had to go! They have to spider the web continuously to provide up the second results.

Sounds like Google is feeling the pinch with the popularity of Twitter news sharing and Facebook interaction to me. With instant news being found out on Twitter and shared, who has to go to Google News anymore. Remember when Michael Jackson died? I found out on Twitter before any of the news networks had picked up the story. That really must have made ole Google feel out of the loop.

In the past weeks Google has signed non-exclusive agreements with Twitter and Facebook to use their instantaneous news to update their own index hoping that it can woo back immediate news and information junkies from Twitter Search and Facebook updates. Although this doesn’t sound like a problem, Google must be scared with the increasing popularity of Facebook and migration of regular email users to solely Facebook mail users as this will hurt them in their pocketbook for sponsored advertising.

For Twitter users this new Google thrust is a boon. Your tweets may very well be the hot property and viral message that now gets incredibly huge exposure and bonus staying power by being included into the Google index.

Based on this information if you are not on Twitter, you’d really better be considering getting started. This mash-up of Twitter, Facebook, and Google is bound to be a huge boon for website and businesses who dare to really take advantage of it.

If you need help with implementing Twitter check out our Twitter services to help you get started.

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Creating a File Shortcut in Office Applications

Screen shot showing new shortcuts in file menu bar.I think that you will love this neat little shortcut that I have been using, if you don’t know about it already. Follow the instructions below to add a shortcut link on the system file menu screen for any Microsoft Office Applications. Now, I just wish Microsoft would allow me to create these handy shortcuts from any Windows and systems application.

I’ve inserted an image from one of my file menus just to the right so you can see exactly what I am talking about. As I do not save my files in the My Documents folder, it is helpful for me to have shortcuts to file locations that I use frequently on the file menu bar. Here’s how to do it so you can save time too.

  1. Open the office application of your choice (Word, Excel etc.). Microsoft calls this file menu the “My Places” bar. Navigate to and select, but do not open the folder that you want to add to the menu.
  2. Click Tools and then Add to My Places. Your selected folder will now appear at the bottom of the My Places menu bar. If you don’t see it, right click on the bar and select small icons as it may be hidden for the moment or resize the dialog box so you can see your new folder.
  3. To move your new folder up to the top of the menu on the My Spaces bar, right click on the item you want to move and click move up or move down as needed.

I find the addition of my most frequently used files to be very helpful and only wish that I could do this in all my computer applications. I think that once you try it, you’ll be doing custom file additions to your My Places bar too!

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Investing in an Assistant

If you are a small to medium sized business owner you will understand that downtime is important but very hard to have when you own your own business. You typically cannot shutter your doors and windows when you go on vacation or want to take a weekend off. You can control that you don’t work 24/7, but most business owners will continue to have some degree of contact with the office even when on vacation.

For me, I am getting ready to do some European travel this summer. I will be out 10 days in Paris, France and out two weeks in Russia later in the summer. In both cases I am not expecting to have email or phone contact. So short of closing your business and angering customers what do you do? For me, I am taking my Christmas holiday to train a new personal assistant. Although in one week I cannot do a brain clone, I can set the groundwork with a new assistant to give them the background needed to be able to monitor and answer as many questions as possible in my absence and then continue additional long distance training. I will be training my assistant to do minor AdWords account management tasks and to monitor customer service e-mail and voice traffic.

I am fortunate in that I am already working with the person whom I have chosen to be my personal assistant, but if you do not have the same situation, you may want to consider contacting Kathy Goughenour of Virtual Assistant Training. Kathy has been a personal assistant and now trains others on how to be virtual assistants. She knows her students and can recommend one to you to contact to become your personal assistant on a full-time or part-time basis.

There is no reason in today’s web connected world why a personal assistant cannot monitor phone, email, and business traffic for you from just about any location. If you are feeling too tethered to your own growing business, now’s the time to start planning for your free time by considering training a personal assistant.

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What is Google Base?

Setting up a Google Base account is the first step you must take to have your items for sale to be shown in Google Products. What exactly is Google Base? Let’s explore that a bit is easy terms.

First here is the link to set up your Google Base account.  When you load your products and you will do this in a very special syntax your products will then have the opportunity to be shown on Google Products pages as well as in the organic results under a listing called Shopping.

Sometimes a pay per click customer will see a competitors item shown with an image in the organic results and think that this is an AdWords vehicle and that if they set up AdWords image ads there images of products will show in the organic results of Google.com, this is not the case. Google Base is unique and another free search vehicle and is not associated with participation in Google AdWords, although Google AdWords text ads may show on the Google Products shopping page but only as text ads.

You can submit your product listing to Google Base as either a tab delimited text spreadsheet or as an XML data feed. I personally like the XML data feed. For more information on the specifics of how to do this and the format, please visit this Google Base information page on data feeds.

Once your feed is created, you will load the feed using FTP to a special location that Google provides. After that it is up to Google if they will show your products, images, pricing and information when it matches a search.

For e-commerce sellers Google Base provides another great way to showcase your products using Google.