You want sexy? Let’s talk accounting! That’s right – few things are less enticing than accounting software, but I’m going to do my best to make number-crunching in the sky a little bit more appealing. You’ve undoubtedly got something you use to track your sales, pay your bills and balance your accounts. It might be a dusty old copy of Excel or an aging QuickBooks program on a dying PC, but it’s there. No modern business runs very well without accounting software.

Accounting is dry and the software packages that handle your accounting are often even drier. Even worse, the accounting software often lives on one computer or an office server with very limited access. This is partly intentional – financial data is confidential, and you need to keep it secure. But it also means that a lot of vital information – even in an abridged format – is only accessible via a gatekeeper of some kind. If you need an updated quarterly report after David in accounting has left for the weekend, you’re probably out of luck.

Cloud-based accounting software changes all that. Now, before you gasp in horror at the idea of putting your financial information in the hands of data centers miles away from your office, rest assured that, in terms of overall reliability and security, cloud-based accounting packages are likely better than what you’ve got on that dusty PC in the back of the office. In fact, the very same folks that created that package may now have a cloud-based version available. For example, the most popular business bookkeeping software, Quickbooks, has a completely online version that matches most of the capabilities of the desktop-based version.

Why Now?

Maybe you’re already using Quickbooks. Why would you want to switch to the cloud-based version? After all, if something’s not broken, you shouldn’t fix it, right? And there’s nothing compelling about accounting software anyway – it’s just numbers, and you’re the person who, as a business owner, has the insight to make sense of them.

The primary reason echoes what I talked about last month: access. Financial information, as dry as it may be, is critical to your business. If you’re dialed in to your business, you want to know about sales, cash-flow and expenses on a daily basis. In the distant past (say, 20 years in technology time), you’d have to wait for someone to prepare that information for you. More recently, if you were in the office, you might be able to fetch that information from your accounting system in real time from one of your office computers. And if you’re really advanced, maybe you connect to your network when you’re out of the office and view reports and ledgers.

When you put all that in the cloud, though, things change dramatically. Is it tax time? Give your CPA their own user name and password, and they never have to even visit your office. Have multiple locations or a bookkeeper with a new baby that wants to work from home? You control the access, giving the appropriate privileges to the users that need them. Reports on the health of your business are available in real time to anyone with an internet connection. Send a quote from the airport lounge, or invoice a client while you’re drinking a beer at the hotel bar. Just don’t spill your drink into the keyboard.

Anytime, anywhere access is great – transformative, even – but there are other good reasons to move to cloud-based accounting software. One is maintenance; although you may be able to limp along with a 12-year-old version of Peachtree on your PC, you eventually have to upgrade, and the maintenance and backups associated with keeping accounting software and data up to date can be a real pain, especially if you don’t have an IT person to help you.

With cloud-based accounting, the only software you need is a web browser. Heck, sometimes you don’t even need that, since some cloud accounting services now have smartphone and tablet apps. But working in a web browser is now a pretty familiar experience for most folks, and just about every modern computer has an internet browser. Getting rid of software and install disks can be surprisingly liberating. You log in, and you’re just there – nothing to install or upgrade.

This also means that you’ll get new features instantly – if the accounting software company adds some nifty new charts and graphs, you don’t have to buy the next version to get it. It’s all included in the subscription fee.

It Costs Money?

Hold up, you say – there’s a monthly fee? Yes, that’s pretty much the way most of these services work: Instead of paying, say, a few hundred bucks for a box with disks in it, you’ll pay a few dozen bucks every month to access the software. If you need a ton of users, you might pay a little more. But that’s the biggest catch – it only works as long as you’re paying for it.

Of course, you’re probably already paying monthly for a wide variety of other services, like utilities or mobile phones or internet access. Still, paying for access to software is often a tough pill for many business owners to swallow when they could just buy something once in a box and replace it only when they have to. In many cases, the long-term costs of cloud-based accounting packages are higher than buying a package with similar capabilities every few years.

The providers of this software know this, and they make great efforts to increase the value proposition of their offerings. For a company like Intuit, the maker of both the “boxed” version of Quickbooks and the online, cloud-based, pay-by-the-month version, they’re going to get your money either way, so you’d think they may not care one way or the other.

But Intuit is pushing hard into cloud-based accounting and adding new features to its Quickbooks Online package at record pace. If you think about their business model, it actually makes a lot of sense – a company like Intuit spends millions providing customer support for its products, and with so many old versions floating around out there, convincing users to migrate to a single, cloud-based version makes their entire support program much simpler.

Quickbooks Online leads the pack in inexpensive cloud-based accounting, but if you’re interested, companies like Xero, Freshbooks, Zoho and many others offer similar products. If your’e concerned about security and data integrity (and you absolutely should be), keep in mind that these companies have backup systems and security mechanisms that go far beyond what you could ever implement for the accounting package you’ve got on your office computer. Of course, if you’re truly paranoid, buy boxed software and put it on a computer with no network connection at all and store your backups off-site in a fire safe. You’ll be safe and secure, and that tinfoil hat looks pretty good on your anyway.

- Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

Sample pages from our new SEO eBook

This easy-to-digest volume includes tips on how to correct problems with your site, how to build original content and how to leverage some of the idiosyncrasies of search traffic to craft a strategy for grabbing more visitors and sales. It’s almost 30 pages of SEO goodness and knowledge and it’s absolutely FREE. Download it here.

post-itsignature.com runs a highly customized version of storeBlox CS and includes built-in authentication of authorized resellers and selective display of information and features based on role. Check it out here!

1. Log into your webBlox dashboard
2. Select Manage Users
3. Click Export Results as CSV File

That’s it! You’ll have a file you can open in Excel orimport into services like Constant Contact, Mailchimpor CRM packages like Salesforce, Highrise, Zoho or any others.

Need help with an export or import? Just give us a shout! Want more detail? Here ‘s a great video overview of managing users. Need to reverse the process? Contact us for assistance with User Imports!

The thing is, the concept of cloud computing does have an underlying meaning that might be useful if anyone outside the insular world of nerds and geeks actually understood it. At its most elemental level, the cloud is just a place other than your computer where computer-y things happen – processing, storing files, serving up videos. That’s nothing new; remote computing – or, taking the load off the computer you’re sitting in front of and moving it somewhere else – has been around nearly since the dawn of computing, since mainframes wouldn’t exactly fit under your desk.

Most of what we do on the internet is sent to us from elsewhere, which is sort of the point of this whole internet thing – connectedness. You don’t want 100 million YouTube videos on your hard drive (trust me on this one). So when people talk about “cloud computing,” it can be especially confusing because, really, most of what you see in your web browser or email program is living somewhere else. (True nerds will scoff at my lack of distinction between regular infrastructure and cloud infrastructure; go back to Reddit and quiet down.) So, the next time one of your customers corners you on the fairway and asks if you’re using the cloud for your business, what the heck should you say?

I’m here to help. I’m going to spend the next few posts discussing practical uses of the cloud for every single business owner. We’ll get past the most obvious manifestation of working in the cloud – document sharing (yes, it’s great) – and talk about how to use the cloud for things that really matter, like closing sales and securing your data. In fact, this month I’m going to dive straight in to the sometimes-prickly subject of presentations. That’s right – let’s talk about Powerpoints.

Slide Into It

Many of us have a love-hate relationship with slide presentations – if you’ve ever sat through a bad one, it’s tempting to blame the format itself for the boredom, anger, slumber or outright nausea that it caused. Mostly, though, a poor presentation is the fault of the speaker or the person that created it. The format itself is a succinct, visual method for communicating ideas (or reinforcing spoken concepts) that is still in wide use for one primary reason: It works.

I’m not going to tell you how to create good presentations (although, in my experience, using on-screen explosions can work wonders), but it’s important to remember that, in one way, a presentation is like a camera – the best one is the one you have with you. If your sales presentations are stuck on a desktop computer and you’re on your laptop, or they’re stuck on laptop and you’ve only got your tablet, they’re not going to do you much good. And, if you just ate a particularly incredible pastrami sandwich and were struck with (before the heartburn) the three remaining key benefits you need to elucidate in order to close the Henderson deal this afternoon, how awesome would it be to add those directly from your smartphone or tablet that you’ve got with you? Put down the mustard and let’s talk.

The Players

Keeping your presentations in the cloud has many of the same benefits as sharing any document in the cloud – you can have other users access or edit them, you can get to them wherever you have internet access, and you’ll always have the latest version. But cloud presentation software can also eliminate the need for, well, software itself. The folks at Microsoft hate to hear this, but (in addition to other passable, open-source alternatives to Office itself), Google gives away a pretty darn good presentation creation tool as part of its own Google Docs offerings. The whole thing lives in the cloud – the application is presented in your web browser, and the document storage (you can store word processor docs and spreadsheets as well) live on something now called Google Drive, which is probably what most people think of when they hear “cloud” – a big hard drive in the sky.

With Google’s presentations, you can build, edit and present your killer, deal-closing slide deck on your computer, your tablet, or even your smartphone. Change a few lines over lunch on your tablet and those changes will be right there when you load it up on your laptop in the conference room. When inspiration hits, you’ll be able to act on it immediately. (Of course, I’m assuming you have internet access – if you don’t have internet access for all your devices, cloud computing is by definition not for you.)

Google’s suite is great, but it’s very Google-centric, and not everyone has hopped on that bandwagon (that said, if you’re on Android, it’s probably a no-brainer). But, let’s say you’re a Microsoft fan and want to stick with Redmond’s products. They’ve got a similar set of tools, including SkyDrive (for document storage) and a product called Office 365 that offers cloud-based Office apps for a monthly fee.

Macintosh, iPhone and iPad lovers have a simple, built-in way to create and share presentations with iCloud. Apple offers a basic level of iCloud storage for free, and Apple’s presentation app, Keynote, is a Powerpoint-killer in almost every way. Simple, slick and packed with features, Keynote is available as a download for every Apple device. When you save your Keynote presentations to iCloud, they’re available instantly, everywhere you have internet access, without any web browsers, software or other configuration required. For the road warrior who just doesn’t want to hassle with technology, iCloud and Keynote may be the ultimate presentation machine. Give someone a Keynote presentation on your iPad and you’ll see their eyes light up. It’s that good.

Finally, if you want a presentation tool that works with absolutely every platform and shows no preference for one over the other, it’s hard to beat DropBox. DropBox offers a basic storage plan for free, and has apps for every major platform. The power of DropBox is in its simplicity – it’s just a drive on your computer or an app on your tablet or smartphone. Save your Powerpoint or PDF to your DropBox, and you can pull it up instantly on your other devices.

Dropbox doesn’t do presentations on its own, but since it can view most documents, it works great in a pinch when you’ve got to show someone something and you don’t have the ideal device with you. You can view your Powerpoints, yes, but you can also keep product images, price lists and all sorts of other selling information on your Dropbox for easy answers to customer questions. The data will always be current, synchronized, and at your fingertips. It’s free and works with just about anything. It might become your best sales presentation partner. What are you waiting for?

- Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

It’s also a given that an opt-in email address is golden — when a user registers on your site and you can send them promotions, they’re much more likely to buy again.

You can conquer both of these with a little email kung fu, using storeBlox CS email customization to offer incentives for registration.

Customizing emails in storeBlox CS can help build repeat business

1. Log in to your storeBlox CS webBlox dashboard
2. Under Content Administration, select Email Notifications
3. Edit the User Registration template
4. Add a one-time discount code, e.g. “Thank you for registering! To receive a discount on your next order, enter this code during checkout!”

You can use this two ways:

• Offer a benefit for registering - Splash an ad on the homepage using our handy banner manager (tutorial here) that offers a discount for registering, and link it to the registration form. You’ll have an opt-in email address and registered user.
• Surprise bonus - Added to the order confirmation or registration template, a discount code (tutorial here) for the user’s next order is a fabulous way to get that customer back and ordering again!

Soon, we’ll be adding the capability to send one-time emails only after the first order, for even better customization.

We’re happy to offer blog readers a sneak preview of the storeBlox CS 2012 Infographic this morning. We’ll be pushing it out to the industry at large via email blast later today, but you can get it right now, right here, absolutely free.

Click on the image for a high-resolution JPG version

You can also get a beautiful PDF suitable for printing, framing, or whatever the heck else you’d like to do with it by heading over to the download page.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about visitors on your site

Here in Austin, I teach classes at a local non-profit organization that helps people start their own businesses. I’ve been teaching folks about building basic web sites, search engine optimization, and web marketing for about five years. Once – and only once, mind you – I taught a class on web analytics.

Web analytics are the statistics that a website generates about users, where they come from, what they do, when they leave, and so on. It’s incredibly valuable information for anyone who operates a web site – in fact, some kind of analytics understanding is mandatory for anyone who wants to understand their website performance.

It’s also very boring. In fact, the class I taught on analytics put everyone to sleep so quickly that I decided never to teach it again. Somewhere, there are statistics professors who can make this stuff interesting. I couldn’t, so I gave up.

But every web site owner should know at least a few things about what’s going on with their site –especially if you have an e-commerce site. And, honestly, if you can pay attention to a few key factors in your web statistics, you’ll have the information you need to make constructive adjustments.

So, grab a double espresso and get ready for the hits – and only the hits – of web analytics. If you can grasp a few simple concepts and remember a couple of key metrics, you’ll know enough to be dangerous in no time.

Start Measuring

First, you’ll need an analytics package. The most common one is Google Analytics; it’s free and most web site building packages support it right out of the box. Signing up for Google Analytics requires a Google account and enough access to your website to insert the tracking code. If putting tracking code into your website sounds like open-heart surgery to you, then call your web developer or web host and they’ll walk you through it or take care of it for you. It only takes a few minutes.

Give Analytics a few days to start collecting data, and at least a month before you really start trying to get anything meaningful out of it. The more statistics you have the better, but if your needs are urgent — let’s say users are abandoning your site in record numbers – a month of data will at least give you enough information to understand why.

The primary metric (metric is a fancy word for measurement) that most site owners look at first is the number of page views on their site. A page view is generated when someone pulls up a page on your web site and looks at it. As a crude number, page views are helpful in determining overall traffic to your site. But alone, page views aren’t a very meaningful statistic.

More meaningful measurements of site traffic actually come from the various visit/visitor numbers. A Visit is just that: a visit to your web site, whether to one page or many. It’s a single user’s experience at your site, from the time they arrive to the time they leave. This number will often be somewhere in the vicinity of your Visitor numbers, which is the actual number of visitors that came to your site during that period.

Visitors are so important that Google now calls out this number on the very first page of Analytics: “3,000 people visited this site.” Look more closely and you’ll notice a qualification in visitor numbers: the term “unique”. Unique visitor metrics are important because they throw out all the repeat visits and give you a picture of how many truly unique visitors came to your site during a given period.

What are they doing?

Once you understand how many people are coming to your site, you need to get at least a basic idea of what they’re doing when they get there. Ideally, you want people to stay on your site long enough to browse, read or buy something. This is where “time on site” or duration comes in. Obviously, if users spend only a few seconds on your site, that means they’re arriving and very quickly leaving. This is not uncommon – many people quickly leave (or “bounce” out of) websites very quickly because it’s not what they were looking for.

However, a continuous pattern of very short visits (a very low overall visit duration) probably means that there’s something wrong with the content on your site, or that many people are finding it for the wrong reasons. If your average visit duration is very low – say, 30 seconds or less – you’ll need to take a hard look at the content you’re presenting.

Visit duration dovetails nicely with “Bounce Rate”, which is a measure of how many visits result in a single page viewed followed by an immediate exit. A bounce is likely (though not always) a visitor who didn’t find what they wanted – they came to a page on your site and left. However, with more and more sites presenting a lot of vital information on a single page these days, high bounce rates are not uncommon. One way to reduce high bounce rates is to build landing pages for your products and services that encourage users to explore further with a prominent call-to-action – e.g. a “Click for more info!” or an invitation to a special offer or discount.

The last vital statistic for visitors is the percentage of new vs. returning visitors. If your goal is to bring in new customers via your website, you want a healthy number of new visits every month – that is, users that have not visited your site in the past. If you have a site where existing users must come back all the time to get new information (say, order status information) then it’s not unusual to have a high percentage of return visitors. In that case, your returning visitors might make up as much as half of your total visitors.

Now you’ve got a picture of what visitors are doing when they come to your site: How many of them came, how many of those were new, how long they stayed, and how many of them came in and left immediately. The final set of metrics you need to understand are what, exactly, your visitors are looking at when they come to your site.

Content is King

Under the “Content” menu in Google Analytics is your other vital set of statistics: information on the pages that users view. This one is pretty straightforward, but you’ll want to check it out frequently. It’s a simple list of the top pages viewed on your site, along with a percentage of total views for each page. If a page has “5.5%” next to it, that means all its views constituted 5.5 percent of the total page views during that period.

For most sites, the homepage (usually “home” or “index”) will have the vast majority of page views, unless your site is structured in such a way that a particular product or service of yours is vastly more popular than everything else on your site. The key here lies in what’s directly below that home page statistic: What are the other pages on your site that are most popular? You may find, for instance, that a product or service of yours is much more popular online than it is in other areas of your marketing presence.

What do you do with all this information? Visitor numbers should give you an idea of how your site is performing (and growing) overall, and whether or not the content on your site is appealing to visitors. Content metrics provide insight into which areas of your site are most popular. That might lead you to push a product or service harder, or it might indicate that something you feel should be popular on your site needs more prominent placement. With just a few simple numbers, you can analyze and make changes to your site to squeeze the best possible performance out of it.

- Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

• Flash conversion: If you have any Flash-based content on your home page, eBlox will rebuild it in HTML5, which works in all modern browsers and touch devices. HTML5 is the standard that most web sites and devices are moving toward, so conversion of your animations, including their interactive features and buttons, is a wise move for forward-thinking company store managers.

HTML5 banners have interaction and animation, and work on all modern browsers.

• HTML5 Animation: eBlox will create original HTML5 animations and presentations for your homepage or other site areas (we’ve got a couple of good examples in this project and this one). HTML5 banners work on almost all mobile and touch devices, such as iPads and other tablets, and have the same type of animation, interactivity and “gee-whiz” factor as Flash animations. If you’d like a quote on HTML5 animations or banners for your company store (or any site you manage), please contact us for a quote.

New domains include the short, sweet promoshops.com.

As always, Pro-level stores include a top level domain – like coolstore.com – and a premium SSL certificate for your domain. For those customers that host at subdomains, though, you’ve now got a few new options for your store address.