Wring More Sales From Your Gmail Inbox

Email Extractor https://emailextract.pro/ is a cheap and powerful program to quickly scan and capture email addresses in your Gmail inbox. A free version is available but pretty much worthless as it only allows for 500 records return. But the paid version is affordably priced at $29 per user annually, and $299 unlimited users annually:

Email Address Extractor

The app uses both the Gmail and Gdrive API which means you’re not running any of your information through a 3rd party server. The app works directly in Google Sheets as an Add-on. It’s a simple search based interface to collect and organize your Gmail emails into a simple spreadsheet in Gdrive. This also makes for pretty fast search processing. But expect to wait a few minutes when extracting larger inboxes the first time.

The multiple search filtering functions are what really makes this app powerful:

Advanced search filters:

  1. Email Address Fields
  2. Gmail Fields
  3. Subject Line
  4. Body keyword/phrase search
  5. Advanced Search (Accepts standard advanced search operators, eg From:Paypal)

The subsequent search results will appear in a Google Sheet containing two sheets, all emails and a cleaned list of unique emails only.

For those looking for a new marketing list affordably, this program is well worth the investment.

 

 

 

MYSQL 8 – Stable Meets Speed

Revamped by Oracle to compete against speedy NoSQL competitors, MySQL 8 is a significant step up in speed and performance, both ingress and egress. Here’s a recent testing done in January with MySQL 8 vs MySQL 5.7 from Several Nines, a DB infrastructure service company. (MySQL 5.7 is basically the standard cloud MySQL version, Google’s Cloud SQL product runs a flavor of MySQL 5.7)

https://severalnines.com/blog/mysql-performance-benchmarking-mysql-57-vs-mysql-80

There are tons of improvements that are present in MySQL 8.0. The benchmark results reveals that there has been an impressive improvement, not only on managing read workloads, but also on a high read/write workload comparing to MySQL 5.7.

But be aware the single instance installs of MySQL will need tweaking before it can beat 5.7, and MySQL 8 really starts to perform better when using multiple instances. For instance this Packt Pub test shows MySQL 8 pulls away at the 3 instance environment.

https://hub.packtpub.com/top-10-mysql-8-performance-benchmarking-aspects-to-know/

MySQL 8 has the power to be a real time back office operations engine, and has a lot of new features including security and access management tools.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html

And What About Data Privacy of Small Business on Facebook?

Who cares about the data of millions of consumers, perhaps more valuable still is the data Facebook harvests from small business every second. Adding a Facebook pixel to your site and pressing the Advanced button means you open up your site to basically complete monitoring by Facebook. What do they do exactly with the data they collect from the millions of small businesses? What can they do, what can’t they do? Small business should consider a Facebook audit and review their privacy settings.

The ultimate problem one can easily foresee with all this data Facebook has collected from millions of small business is, who cares if your company makes sure to do due diligance on the Facebook privacy settings, giving Facebook only the data you are comfortable sharing? Because literally thousands of other small businesses like yours have already given away their data. Facebook doesn’t really need your data to sell your competitor insights into your customer that you would like to keep to yourself.

But of course with the Facebook Insights tool you can glean in aggregate a lot of interesting market/industry wide business intelligence relevant to your business planning? 😉

Hyper targeting is the promised land for Facebook advertising, but the problem is, or the limit to Facebook’s ambitions in the end perhaps is that human beings really aren’t that complicated. Once your company figures out its core targets with all the usual tools – internal sales data, test marketing, site analytics, andFacebook’s Insights Tool also 😉 then maybe Facebook small business data won’t quite put small business out of business. But certainly as a small business owner of a Facebook marketing investing company you should spend a few minutes making sure your company’s Facebook privacy settings are where you want them.

Especially companies using Facebook Pixel, a popular remarketing strategy on Facebook, take a minute to protect your company’s information and make sure you are sharing valuable company site data in the way that you are comfortable with.

 

5 Ways To Profit From Cloud Right Now For SMB

The word of the day for SMB considering migrate to the cloud is iterate. In layman’s terms, baby steps. Don’t think you have to move all or even a large piece of your business systems to the clouds in one fell swoop. Rather, take cloud progress in small manageable bites that allow you and your staff to digest without any upset. For SMB decision makers here’s 5 areas where taking cloud steps now can make an immediate impact on your bottom line. Whether using Amazon, Microsoft, Google or another cloud provider these areas are good place to start your research for potential cloud migrations:

  1. Backup, Access, and Security: Due to the remote nature of cloud data storage and management, cloud services always come with default tools  for backup, access control, and security measures such as custom firewalls.
  2. Connect and Integrate: SMB typically has several software system investments and databases. Perhaps the most appealing for SMB looking at cloud, integrating your various software systems, and connecting overlapping data (customers, transactions, sales) can create significant productivity and cost savings.
  3. Real Time Reporting: SMB can get customized reports, and customized data in those reports to access levels you create. Take accounting, billing, payments, projects, and sales together in one report, and get the business intel you need for agile day to day business management.
  4. Smart & Easy Apps: All cloud services provide easy visual builder app tools to help connect to customers, teams, and projects. If your business processes are unique and hard to fit into traditional CRM or billing software systems, simple cloud apps can cheaply allow you to customize your business flow.
  5. Marketing, Sales, and Service: Cloud services allow for you to consolidate your marketing and sales, get better reporting, and provide tools and services for existing clients and customers.

A Profitable Rabbit Hole: Spending Time With Google Trends

Think a perennial search term has a secret seasonal fluctuation? Want to see what day of the week people search ‘fix my widget’? Want to make sure your messages are reaching the type of searchers you want when they’re searching? Oh, then you want Google Trends.

https://trends.google.com/trends/

It only takes a few minutes of noodling around your industry’s common searches that fruitful insights can be discovered. For example, you can search the last 5 years of a search term to see long term and seasonal search volume fluctuation. Or going the other way you can start reviewing searches week to week to see that Tuesday is the day, or Friday. And more importantly that Tuesday is Product A type search heavy and Friday is product B type search heavy.

What’s more it’s easy to get started with Google Trends, just start plugging in your top company keywords into the search bar

 

After you enter a keyword term you get a broad overview of search trends around this keyword. And here is where you can do more advanced filter searching. You can filter your results by geography, by time, by demo categories, and by type of search.

It won’t take long as you explore these different search filters to yield interesting feedback on some of your core industry and company keywords.

Also, check out Google Trends Correlate, which provides broader industry search trends, which can be especially helpful when considering offering new products, or just for some quick down and dirty industry market research:

https://www.google.com/trends/correlate

 

Google Trends is an excellent free tool that allows small business owners access to sophisticated search volume numbers and trends.

More Click Fraud Commotion, This Time From The Source

It’s pretty disheartening to see the click fraud coming not from nefarious types hacking away in exotic locales, but from the advertising platforms themselves.

http://fortune.com/2018/10/17/advertisers-facebook-video-metrics/

Some observers suggested that Facebook’s inflation of video viewing figures affected not only advertisers but also media outlets, many of which made a misguided decision to “pivot” to video, in the expectation that this was how to get people’s attention.

But really this is just another story in a long line of them in the murky world of advertiser safeguards for online advertising. This one though probably should dishearten small to medium sized businesses more than most. Why? Because if you can’t trust the platform itself and you don’t have an enterprise level IT staff to help audit all your digital media, then really what can you do?

Well, a few things. Because as frustrating as this digital advertising world can be for SMB, it’s still a pretty integral one, and one that when working can provide significant cost/benefit advantages over other typical SMB marketing efforts. Consider these strategies to make sure each click/view/swipe you pay for is legitimate.

Multiple Analytics for 20/20 vision

Frequently SMB relies on one analytics package to measure their online efforts. Adding one closer to their actual server logs is typically an affordable and effective way to double check the effectiveness of your campaigns, as well as provide additional visitor information. For example, a company using Google Analytics can affordably augment traffic stats with a service like Statcounter to provide more in depth reporting on campaign effectiveness.

Eschew The Branding and Sell Something

If you are testing new platforms, new ad campaigns, new media, put a concrete offer and call to action around it. And yes connecting campaigns to measurable customer outcomes means sometimes you have to make an offer. A targeted offer of course in the case of your digital media buying strategy. But an offer nonetheless. The numbers that most advertising platforms give to their advertisers can look impressive. But at the end of the day a call to action with an offer is what SMB should ultimately boil down each of their platform’s campaigns and measure the results accordingly.

Use Your Analytics Monitoring Tools

Every Analytics package these days comes with email notification monitoring tools. Google Analytics for example makes it easy to create custom alerts in just a few minutes:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033021?hl=en

Creating custom alerts can help measure if campaigns don’t meet predefined thresholds for typical analytics measurements such as bounce rate, goal conversions, pages per visit, visitor path, etc.

Click fraud, whether an outside job or an inside one, is a real and continuing threat to SMB marketing budgets for the foreseeable future. SMB would be wise to get ahead of this issue with simple tech upgrades and a monitoring strategy.

 

 

 

Get A Quick and Easy Job Posting Template

Sometimes the right words just don’t come to the surface, especially when tasked with creating a job post. Google Hire, the company’s recruiting SaaS offering, has provided a template for posting a new job along with the typical sections that comprise a job posting. The template basically breaks down 4 primary categories of an effective job post

  1. Explain the core purpose of your company
  2. Outline the high-level daily functions of the position
  3. Detail the day-to-day job duties associated with the role
  4. Explain the qualifications or job requirements

Your job title requires some thought, use these tips:

Job titles are important, very important. Consider these two tips for writing great job titles:

  1. Avoid company jargon or acronyms
  2. Choose a job title that your top candidates would search for

Find the full blog post with link to Google Doc template.

 

Google Add-ons: Where To Start For Small Business

Michaes Subramanian helms Jivrus Technologies, an up and coming Google Partner development company and publisher of several popular Google Add-ons. He took a minute to discuss how Small Business on G Suite can productively explore the benefits of using Google Add-ons.

For a small business first approaching Google Add-ons, what types of Add-ons should they look at first?

Invoicing is one example of how Google Add-ons can help save time and labor for a small business. Creating forms and managing the day to day business communications is also an area where Add-ons are worth investigating. Add-ons work well with task management, building quotations, proposals, and estimates, as well as 3rd party integrations like analytics data, email marketing, and productivity apps like draw.io.

How do Add-ons work within the Gsuite domain backend? Can Add-ons from 3rd party providers be automatically updated? Can Add-ons be turned on/off for some users or organizations within the domain?

G Suite add-ons are written in Google Apps Script, Javascript, HTML, CSS and runs on G Suite platform. There are auto updates as new releases are made. No need to re-install. Yes, the domain admin has full control over the Add-ons.

How to make sure your Add-ons are secure when working with sensitive files, or files that are bound by compliance regulations?

Google makes it very transparent what permissions are required for each Add-on. So it’s pretty straightforward to review the permissions required to see if it fits within your industry’s compliance regulations. Also, make sure to accept only the trusted developers. As with any developer make sure the Add-on is still being updated, and that support services are available from the developer if needed.

Last Thoughts on Add-ons for small business owners?

Small and medium sized business can implement Google-Addons to improve efficiencies at a very low price. Add-ons function securely within your company’s G Suite domain. Additionally, your G Suite administrator has full access to configuration and permissions.  I am very bullish on the Google Add-ons market and believe it will flourish in the next 1 to 2 years.

When Security Compliance Creates More Problems

None of us has been spared the incessant nagging website popups, which force you to accept that the site is using cookies. You can thank the GDRP rules for this addition to life’s little annoyances. Whether the merit of the privacy transparency attempted with these notices is valid or not, the real problem is that they create an additional security hole that renders these cookie monster popups a net step backwards for web privacy and security.

Because surprise, surprise – web publishers who aren’t careful are allowing their users to get hit with malware:

https://blog.sucuri.net/2018/08/cookie-consent-script-used-to-distribute-malware.html

After GDPR was enacted, many website owners were looking for an easy way to implement the changes to be GDPR compliant. Some webmasters turned to services that offered to display a cookie consent notice on their website through a simple JavaScript add-on.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not check the code they are adding to the website. This is a prime opportunity for hackers to trick website owners to add the malicious code onto their own website. It’s possible that initially, the code was benign and that the hackers were just waiting for a large number of websites to add it so they could modify the code and infect all of the websites at once.

So, in the attempt to give users control over their privacy, this compliance process is actually opening up users to all sorts of privacy compromises through any sort of malware injection you can come up with off the top of your head.

Add Some HIPAA to This Mess

Or take the recent example from a very large insurance company’s new app, which allows user to scan documents and upload them into an online beneficiary portal. Problem is, the images must be saved locally, then uploaded back to the app. Which means that very sensitive PHI, ie social security numbers, signatures, etc – are now locally on the customers device leaving them very vulnerable to not only device theft, but any sort of malware that can scan local image directories and (using a touch of AI why not?) surreptitiously upload infected device sensitive PHI scans to 3rd party servers.

Protect Your Business Against Its Protectors

Whatever side of the GDRP fence you sit, making sure that only clean code goes on your site is important. Whether you love or loathe the idea of HIPAA, making sure your health practice’s HIPAA compliance efforts themselves aren’t creating PHI vulnerabilities is critical.

Small business owners obviously must navigate the currents in this everchanging regulatory compliance environment. It would be wise to handle these compliance processes carefully. GDRP cookie popups can be managed properly if you take the time to see how it works on your site. Your practice can make sensitive PHI scanning work in a ‘best practice’ HIPAA compliant manner with a little foresite and planning.

SMB should expect more regulatory compliance management issues upcoming, certainly in the next 12-24 months as large government regulations are rolling out aspects certainly will be amended. Additionally, a fast changing cloud infrastructure means SMB will have better authorization tools that, while requiring some initial investment, should allow SMB to steer productively in the currently churning seas of privacy and security business compliance.