Inbound marketing – the difference between potential customers finding your company vs. you looking for potential customers. Maybe that is a bit to simplistic. According to Wikipedia – Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers by publishing helpful information on a blog, etc. {earning their way in} in contrast to outbound marketing via paid advertisements {buy, beg, or beg their way in}.
If your company is making the switch from outbound marketing and paid advertisements {which I’ve never found have worked well for our company} to inbound marketing; one of the things that you need to do is track how successful you are at publishing content on the web that is getting you found and analyzing if you are being found by the right people – you know – the ones that actually end up purchasing the goods or services that you offer.
I admit, I still struggle with this. Like many business owners I only have so many hours in my day and I don’t have the luxury of hiring someone just to market our business or monitor the various social media platforms we are on. Our marketing department consists of “me, myself, and I” and I can tell you that “I’m” very busy!
I know that analyzing and tracking information such as this is important:
- how many hits or page views that our website and blog receive
- are people sharing the information they find on social media networks
- are people printing out the information they fin
- are they purchasing the higher end QuickBooks training that is offered here
- what are the most popular pages on our blog or or website
- how many people actually request trials of our software
- how they found us/where these visitors are coming from
- how many people actually buy our software {or hiring me to do some QuickBooks consulting} after visiting our sites
I do have some things in place – I have a Google Analytics account for both our website and our blog and some other tracking plug-ins on both our main website and here on our blog. And I do look at them occasionally – probably not often enough though; and I have to admit I’m often overwhelmed by the amount of data that I see. With that, onto today’s eBook from Hubspot!
Free eBook: An Introduction to Inbound Marketing Analytics
Analytics programs can give marketers amazing insight into their marketing campaigns, but this wealth of data comes with a cost. There’s just so much information – and so many possible combinations of metrics and reports to track – that many marketers get overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all.
But don’t let data overload stop you from using analytics to improve your marketing effectiveness.
Hubspot’s free ebook highlights the essential inbound marketing metrics for data-driven decision making, along with advice for how to use that data to improve and optimize your marketing efforts.
This 85-page guide from HubSpot will teach you how to effectively analyze the following marketing channels:
- Your Website & Landing Pages
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Search
- Business Blogging
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Lead Nurturing & Marketing Automation
Start analyzing and improving your marketing today by clicking this link and completing a short request form.
I will be honest – I have downloaded the eBook, but haven’t read the entire thing yet – but it looks pretty interesting and I’m hoping that it will help me to get on track to develop some sort of tracking system or at least to better understand the data from my Google Analytics account!
Have a great Friday everyone!
Top 10 Thursday features 10 of the most interesting articles that I found the previous week. There is so much news and information available on the web – it’s difficult to read everything and stay up to date. As I read articles on the web – I’ll share some that I feel are important.
General Business:
Bookkeeping, Accounting, Payroll & Taxes
Construction
- An Analysis of Arizona’s Prompt Payment Statutes {Private and Public Works}
- San Diego has $13.4B in construction projects in the works
- Missouri DOT works to make state bridges safer
- Rochester, NY gets $100M for Interstate 390 upgrade
- New York Construction Defects Paper
- Architecture billings up, construction materials prices down
- Department of Labor {DOL} Proposes Hiring Goal for Federal Contractors to Employe Disabled Workers
- Missouri Proposes to Eliminate Prevailing Wage Requirements
Marketing & Social Media
Well, there’s our Top 10 most interesting articles for last week – do you have some interesting news that you’d like to share?
Keeping track of bookkeeping/accounting tasks and the information that is required when you hire a new employee can be pretty overwhelming for a business owner or bookkeeper. In the normal rush of day-to-day activities; sometimes important items can get overlooked and come back to bite you later.
Welcome to Tuesday Training!
Tuesday Training is a new feature here on the QuickBooks for Contractors blog. While everyday focuses on training of one sort or another, Tuesday’s are dedicated to more in-depth training.
We’ll teach you the things you need to know about using QuickBooks, that you won’t find in the QuickBooks Help file, in order to successfully run your construction business and obtain accurate job costing reports; from eBooks, live webinars, and recorded training sessions.
You’ll find high-quality (budget friendly) training without having to leave the comfort of your home or office.
Bookkeeping & Accounting Tasks
We’ve compiled a list of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual bookkeeping and accounting tasks to help you stay on track – this is also a handy checklist to provide to a new bookkeeper.
This list is geared for contractors and include items such as certified payroll reports, AIA billing draws, Worker’s Comp, and General Liability Insurance tracking reminders.
Excel format, so you can easily add other items and customize it to meet the needs of your business.
We hope that you’ve found today’s Tuesday Training items to be helpful to your business – if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share this with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below
Download your free copy of our Bookkeeping and Accounting Tasks checklist here.
Employee New Hire Packet
What should a “New Hire Packet” contain? Federal W-4, State W-4, and Form I-9 at a minimum – but that really isn’t enough information to keep on file. You, as well as your bookkeeper needs to have more information about a new employee than what is available on these forms. Utilize our New Hire Checklist” to provide your bookkeeper with additional information about the employee.
Word format, so you can easily add additional information and customize it to suit the needs of your business.
Download your free copy of our Employee New Hire Packet by clicking here.
We hope that you’ve found today’s Tuesday Training items to be helpful to your business – if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share this with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below.
Working with taxable and non-taxable items and customers in QuickBooks sometimes just freaks people out and causes them to over think the entire situation. I’m frequently asked how to do this by people who are setting up our AIA billing program – here’s a question that I received recently.
I am getting ready to set the AIA billing program {Construction Application for Payment Solution} up tomorrow and just have a few questions.
Should the income items each be posted to an income general ledger account? Or will I use the subtotal line to point to an income account? If I have to post each income item to an income account – I will have to do 2 sets of them, one for wholesale (no tax) and one for retail (taxable) and I would like to avoid this if possible. I guess though we will have to post them to an income account…..thoughts?
Should we use the group items to setup our labor and materials for the schedule of values? For example, when we bill the customer- we only want DEMOLITION to show up, but for our purposes we have the DEMOLITION broken into labor and material. It seems like this would be a good place to use group items?
Each of your QuickBooks Items/Cost Codes should be set up and linked to BOTH and Income and an Expense/Cost of Goods Sold Account otherwise you’ll never get any decent job costing reports.
Subtotal Items do not link to either an Income or an Expense Account – they simply add up the numbers above it and display the amount on the Estimate and Progress Invoices that you create.
Unless you want to track Wholesale and Retail Income individually on your Profit & Loss Report, there is no need to create two sets of Items. QuickBooks can handle both taxable and non-taxable customers and sales using the same item list. You’ll just want to make sure that you have two Sales Tax Items – one that actually charges the Sales Tax Rate and one that has a 0% rate for Non-taxable sales.
Below is a YouTube video that demonstrates the procedure and shows you what your Sales Tax Liability Report will look like if you do it correctly.
As for using group items to track labor and materials for a specific cost code, there are a couple of different options that you could use, depending upon the amount of detail that you want to track. But group items are definitely the way to go if you want to job cost more information than you want the customer to see.
I hope you’ve found this article to be informative, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below.
Google+ is the newest social media network and it offers so much more than than just the ability to incorporate a +1 button on your blog.
Google+ first introduced what I call a personal page sometime last summer based on the concept of networking by adding people to “circles” that you can create and have full control over. It also provides each of us with the ability to host an online meeting or a hangout where we invite specific people or have it open to the public.
Every Friday at 8 am Pacific/11 am Eastern I usually attend the Accountants, Bookkeepers & Business Owners Hangout for an hour (where we discuss QuickBooks, general business, social media, and whatever).
On Wednesday, I participated in #GPCW (Google Plus Circle Wednesday) on Twitter – which allows you add your Twitter followers to your circles. This is done by sending a tweet using a special hashtag of #GPCW and including the link to your Google Plus personal or business page.
All you need to get started with Google+ is a gmail account, so if you don’t have one go to gmail.com and create one. Set up your personal page and then be sure to add a business page as well. Make sure that you add information and photo’s to your profile and then start searching for people you know to add to your circles.
Follow me on Twitter and watch for the Wednesday hashtag of #GPCW to connect with some really interesting folks, if you already have a Google Plus account you can circle either my personal page or my business page – if you are interested in knowing more about the Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Business Owners hangout every Friday morning be sure to let me know and I’ll make sure that I share the hangout information with you.
Free eBook: Have You Built Your Google+ Business Page Yet?
Get yourself a copy of HubSpot’s ebook to learn how you can start using this new platform for your business, you will need to complete a short form in order to download, but it’s worth the effort.
HubSpot’s guide will provide you with information about:
- How to set up a business page
- Marketing best practices
- Circles and the value of segmentation
- How to incorporate the +1 button on your blog or website
I hope you’ve found today’s topic to be interesting – hope to meet up with you here on the web!
