Work.com Small Business Community Blog

5 Tips for Using Microsoft Excel

Frances Sharpe, who has written an unbelievable 69 Work.com guides and is Work.com's #1 top expert, was previously an editor at Entrepreneur. She's written a very useful guide to Microsoft Excel, an application that a lot of us use every day in business.

Do you use Excel to its maximum potential? Find out from Frances 5 tips for using Excel:

1. Take advantage of templates for cash-flow analyses, balance sheets, depreciation calculators, employee schedules, sales commission tracking, advertising budgets, event schedules, etc.
2. Create formatting styles so you can quickly apply formatting to any worksheet
3. Use PivotTable report to analyze large amounts of data from a database
4. Use macros to automate tasks you regularly perform in Excel
5. Add graphics to your Excel chart for maximum presentation effect

For more great Excel advice, including information about online courses and where to get help. see the Guide to Microsoft Excel.

Insider Tip for More Online Exposure: Blog Your Digg

Hot diggity! You may have noticed that the previous post looks a little different than the typical post on this blog. There I was at digg, checking to see how my new guide (about how businesspeople can promote themselves as experts online) was doing, when I realized there was an option to blog about my digg. So, of course I had to try it - thus you see the previous post, How to Increase Your Online Visibility Using Work.com, as an example of what happens when you blog a digg. The automatic post displays the title of the digg'ed (or dugg?) guide/article, the short description, and then a link to read more (of the guide) or to digg story. Pretty nifty, no?

And yes, dear readers, please, you are all cordially invited to digg my new guide about increasing your online visibility using Work.com. Let's get the word (Work) out there.

P.S. The first 3 people who email me with their Work.com guide digg URL's will get blogged about in this blog!

How to Increase Your Online Visibility Using Work.com

Be known as a guru in the business community and in the wider web...

read more | digg story

How to Be Known as a Guru

Did you know content-based marketing is the latest trend for promoting your business online? Learn how to make this trend work for you and your business -- learn how to increase your online visibility using Work.com in conjunction with the wider web. I just wrote a new Work.com guide with insider tips on how to promote your guide. Some include:

• Email your guide to friends, colleagues, clients
• Check back often to see how your guide is doing on the most popular guides list
• Tell your industry association about your guide and post about your guide at industry forums
• Link to your guide from your site
• Blog about your guide or tell blog authors about your guide
• Add your guide URL to your signature and social networking profiles such as LinkedIn
• Add your guide to social bookmarking sites such as digg and del.icio.us

Remember - the key to a guide that becomes wildly virally popular is a good base of relevant, useful links in  places where others who will link to your guide will see them. Good luck, and get started with your content-based marketing!

Scott Allen Adds Bling to His Work.com Member Profile

I just noticed that Scott Allen, Work.com Sales & Marketing community leader and online business networking expert, has added some bling to his Work.com member profile. He has discovered that not only could he include a link to his website as part of his profile bio, but he could also add a Feedburner headline animator widget that links to his blog for entrepreneurs.

What will he display next to show us his online presence? His flickr badge, his Google Reader widget, his Grazr widget, a LibraryThing list of his favorite books for entrepreneurs, or his LinkedIn widget?

Dan Kehrer, Work.com Editor Podcast Interview: Take Business Action at Work.com

I just finished listening to a podcast interview at MySuccessGateway of Dan Kehrer, our very own Work.com editor and business guru, about how Work.com encourages you to take action on your business tasks.

Happy listening!

Google Apps. It's a Google World After All!

One of the most exciting things to emerge from Google recently is Google Apps for small businesses, which is a suite of applications designed to give employees powerful communication and collaboration tools. Google Apps brings your businesses' technology into the 21st century -- the century of hosted applications. This means: gone are the days of installing office software. Gone are the days of backing up data to a CD or floppy and taking it home for "off site copies." Gone are the endless days of upgrading software and maintaining server networks.

The benefit of a hosted application is that you and your employees can access the applications -- and your data -- from any internetworked computer anywhere. That means you can see your data from home, from any of your office locations, from the road, from your mother-in-law's house -- where ever. And it means that all your staff can work on the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time -- no matter where they are. Oh, and did I mention -- NO more need to buy and install expensive upgrades to your office software.

So what exactly is Google Apps offering?

1. Email and the greatest web mail client ever -- the gmail client -- except with your own domain.
2. Calendar and scheduling tools...allow your staff to share parts or all of each other's calendars and everybody can schedule shared resources -- like the conference room -- without conflict.
3. A super easy to learn and an "everything you need" word processing application.
4. Spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets.
5. Tons of storage space.
6. A web site content management tool -- so staff can create and edit their own web pages without knowing web programming languages
7. Free voice and chat around the world.

Plus more and more to come. All these applications from a web browser? Yes! From your own domain.com? Yes yes yes! As if that isn't enough, ample storage for all your staff's apps and emails. And you can choose the free version or pay a small yearly fee for the premium version.

Sign me up!

Note from Shara: Eric Wolfram, Work.com Internet & Ecommerce community leader, is a web consultant in New York City who provides Internet technology, strategy, and development services. See even more about Eric. If you write a Work.com Internet & Ecommerce guide, Eric will comment on it!

Tags: google apps, eric wolfram

Creating a Great Business Plan

Creating a Great Business Plan by Frances Sharpe is now the #1 business how-to guide at Work.com, surpassing our currently #2 guide, Learning Search Engine Optimization (for now!)

See the popularity ranking of all Work.com guides, and discover the top experts. Popularity is based on guide pageviews, and expert score is based on a combination of how useful members find guides, how many have been written, and how often they're viewed and linked to from other sites. The best way to increase your expert score is to write highly useful guides that people visit often, tell their friends and business contacts about, and link to.

How to Increase Your Exposure Online: 2 New Guides Tell You How

Work.com guide authors get exposure and tell you how to do so as well. AccuraCast, who describes itself as "London's leading search engine marketing agency" just wrote a guide on the top 5 ways to build links for your business website. According to AccuraCast, linkbuilding is important both for natural ranking on search engines and referral traffic from other websites. (Hint from Shara: <spiel>writing a Work.com guide is one great way to get links and traffic!</spiel>)

Lori Redfield of freelancemom.com shares some simple search engine tips that you may not have considered. Her tips and tactics for search engines include:

• The most critical thing to remember is to have excellent content on your website. Add to it all the time! Don't resort to using the same old articles that everyone else is using. Provide your visitors with something worthwhile.


• Have a forum and/or blog on your domain to create tons of constantly changing user created content.


• Stop worrying too much about keyword density. Just worry about organic search engine food from content that adds value and makes sense for your niche.

Thanks Accuracast, Lori, and all others sharing your insider tips with the Work.com community.

Tags: internet marketing, linkbuilding, seo

What REALLY Matters in Web Design

Well, no one has yet submitted a funny Work.com guide about how to survive an IRS audit...I'm still waiting. Come on people, there must be some tax attorneys out there with a sense of humor, right? Maybe the Tax Prophet?

Meanwhile, new guide author and web designer Mike Stover of Troy, Michigan, actually followed my advice in this post about injecting a little life into your guide - check out his guide What REALLY Matters in Web Design. Engaging, useful, and fun(nny).

Thinking of creating a website for your business? Mike says: "I'll help stop you from stepping into that flaming bag on your doorstep that is BAD web design." Forget about what you know about websites -- Mike tells you what's really important.

According to Mike, here are the top 5 things that really matter in web design:

• Your site must load in an acceptable time span for your target audience
• Have clear, easy navigation
• Don't use sucky images
• You have to make time for cross-browser testing or else you may look like a (see guide for full Yiddish slang version)
• SEO trick #1: Build a good website for people with useful information and the search engines will come

Inspired to create a great, user-friendly site for your business? Check out some more resources here, over here, and over there.

Tags: web design, ecommerce