• Make sure your site is producing articles that are actually newsworthy. This means you need to be writing about new developments in the field or area that your site focuses on, and not just posting how-to articles or advice columns. If you are commenting on a new piece of technology, or write about the changes in the retail market you work in, these could be considered News articles.
• Publish original content. If you are just collecting articles from other websites, Google wants you to separate that content from original work, or else they won’t accept your site. So write the articles yourself (or with help from your own staff writers) and write about something you know.
• Advertorials and thinly veiled marketing articles are not considered news, and at worst Google might assume you are misleading your readers, and in turn are misleading their users. So you need to be upfront and ensure you aren’t deceiving readers; promotional articles aren’t what Google News is looking for. If your website contains both promotional and news-style articles, consider separating the two sites so that you can get the exposure from Google News.

If you feel like your website fits the bill and follows Google News guidelines (you can read more about them here), then submit your site and keep it current. You will get exposure and boost traffic to your site, and hopefully you can translate that increase into more readership.

FreshBooks’ entry-level account is completely free. For business owners with less than three clients, this free account is a great place to start. You can create your own invoices, track when your clients receive them, and accept one of thirteen different payment options. FreshBooks automatically sends out late-payment reminders to overdue accounts, and sends you a summary of everything you’ve collected and invoiced each week, as well as tracking expenses if you add them. If your business is growing, or is already well-established, FreshBooks offers three different paid accounts, ranging from $19.95 to $39.95. These allow you to manage more clients and also share your information with other members of your team.

FreshBooks offers a number of features that take advantage of their access to the cloud, like offering mobile apps so you can track your financials from your smartphone or iPad. You can also collaborate with people in different offices (even different countries) with team timesheets, making sure everyone’s contributions are noted. In fact, FreshBooks’ time tracking is what sets it apart from other online accounting programs. You can set a timer to make sure you are collecting all the hours that are owed to you; keep track of unbilled hours so you know how much to invoice when you’re ready; and set different rates depending on the kind of project you’re working on. All of these features are incredibly helpful for small businesses, especially if you are working on a number or projects at once, or you are frequently juggling other things with your work.

Check out FreshBooks here, and you can start your account for free. Hopefully, you know have enough information to be able to choose the online accounting program that’s right for you and your business.

Xero is an online accounting program that is ideal for small businesses where more than one person needs access to the financials. You can set up an unlimited number of users, and control what information each of them can see. It’s easy to share with your accountant or bookkeeper, and real-time access means everyone can see the most up-to-date numbers. Add-ons for payroll, invoicing, and inventory control, among other things, help Xero become an incredibly useful tool for all members of your financial team. You can easily see all the transactions you’ve made, and bank reconciliation means that you can sync all your bank accounts, including foreign currency, to your Xero account, making sure that you can track all of your information in one place.

With Xero’s invoicing feature, you can create your own template for invoices, ensuring a professional look. Xero offers repeating invoice options, to guarantee that you don’t forget to collect what’s owed to you. Customers can pay you online, and you can track who still needs to pay you and send out bulk emails regarding payment.

Xero offers three levels of paid services, ranging from $19 to $39 a month depending on how big a business you are running. These options are great for everyone, whether you are a freelancer with a couple of clients or the owner of a large company with a big payroll. Check out Xero’s free trial here. When you are finished finding out about Xero, check our blog on Friday for info on FreshBooks, and see which online accounting service is best for you.

Fotor is an online photo editing program that allows you to upload photos to the cloud and then edit them in a variety of ways. Crop, resize, or add in effects easily, and you can even do more advanced edits like High Dynamic Range. HDR allows you to take three photos of the same scene, one overexposed, one at normal exposure, and one underexposed, and combine them to get the full range of shadows and highlights. It can be difficult to do HDR if you are a casual photographer, but Fotor enables even new photographers to use this great feature. You can also create collages and order photo cards, and the best part is that the program is free. A great app to get inspired photographs.

Once you’ve made sure your photos look amazing, head over to Pixable to see the pics that you and your friends are uploading to social networks. Pixable curates the dozens (or even hundreds) of photos that are posted to your social networks. By aggregating all the photos from your Facebook friends and people you follow on Twitter and Instagram, Pixable learns what photos are more important to you and then filters them to make sure you see the best ones. The more you use it, the better it is at figuring out what you want to see.

They might not be the most productive, but Pixable and Fotor are definitely a fun way to spend some time on Friday!

The first thing you need to do is figure out what kinds of images you want to post. Are you interested in showing potential customers your products? Do you want to give people a peek inside your day-to-day operations? Can you introduce users to your employees? These are all ways to engage people and get them interested in your company. Instagram is great for showing off the behind the scenes aspect of your business and giving people a bit of insight in how your business runs. Make sure to add hashtags to your photos to help users find your images, and take advantage of the opportunity to share your Instagram photos on other social media networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Some of the most successful brand campaigns on Instagram are user-generated. Consider a photo contest, asking customers to post photos of themselves using your products, or getting images that follow a theme that ties into your company. By engaging people you are more likely to get them to help promote your brand, and their followers will be exposed to your business as well. The social networking aspect of Instagram is very important, and interacting with your followers is key to growing your business.

For more ideas and examples of businesses using Instagram in different ways, be sure to check out Instagram’s Business Blog. It’s full of  information on how best to promote your brand. If you want more help to get yourself set up, Contact Us.

One of the most important things to remember when you are creating your pins is that people find it much easier to scroll vertically rather than horizontally. This means that your images should be tall rather than wide. Tall images are much more likely to be repinned, and consumers feel that there is more information available in a tall image. Also, when you are writing descriptions, try to keep them between 100 and 200 characters (about the same length as a tweet); people are less likely to keep reading when you write more than that.

With Pinterest’s new Rich Pins, the site is making it even easier for businesses to make sure that potential customers to purchase their products. You need to prepare your own website to use Rich Pins by adding meta-tags to your products, and then users can get more information about your product, including pricing, availability, and where to buy it.

The most important thing to remember about Pinterest is that consumers are much more interested in aspirational images and content on this site than on many other social networks, in large part due to the visual aspect of Pinterest. You want images that people will like and, more importantly, want to share with their followers so you can grow your business. If you are looking for help in improving your brand on Pinterest, contact us.

There are four steps towards an online purchase that most customers make: Awareness of your brand, Consideration of your products, Intent to purchase your product (or a comparable version), and Decision. Many consumers are spending more time researching their purchases instead of just clicking on a link from a newsletter or visiting your website from a paid ad. Since it can take more time to get a customer to make that final decision to buy, Google shows you which of your marketing channels is helping your customer get to that decision. Whether it’s email, social media, a referral, or a paid ad, seeing all the marketing channels and determining which one has the most influence can help you tailor your marketing strategy to fit your customers. If more customers aree reaching you from social media, then of course you should be spending more time on that aspect of your marketing campaign. You can learn more about Google’s new Analytics tool here, and you can contact us if you would like more information on how to use this analysis to build your business.

There are plenty of naysayers who think that Glass is merely an overhyped gadget with little traction in the real world, but this project is something that really bears watching. If Glass is successful, it will mark a change in the way people use computers, much like smartphones or tablets have done. With the first pairs being picked up by developers right now, there is sure to be a lot more talk about Glass in the future, and hopefully people like what they see.

So far, the Viber desktop app is pretty basic, and relies heavily on the mobile app. You must register your smartphone with Viber before being able to use the desktop app, and you can only make voice calls to other Viber customers, whereas Skype offers a paid service to call landlines and mobile phones internationally. There is definitely room for improvement, but don’t give up on Viber yet. The ability to switch calls between devices is a plus, and the video and call quality is comparable to Skype and Google Talk, so it is a viable option for some people, especially if you are already a Viber user. If you’re looking for an alternative to Skype, check out Viber here.