Here’s the presentation:

I’ve made the switch and I’m never going back.  This is the way of the future and those who are ahead of the game have started transitioning their systems to this new way of working.  Perhaps you should consider doing same?

So what is SaaS?  It stands for software-as-a-service.  Basically, SaaS is any web-based software product that is available on a subscription basis.  Instead of having software applications reside on your local computer, the software is hosted on the web.  That means you don’t have to buy software from Microsoft and others, you don’t have to maintain it, you don’t have worry about security, bugs, patches, upgrades etc., and you can access your software from any web-enabled system around the world.

The rapid advances in internet broadband bandwidth have enabled SaaS to become a reality.   The announcement of the new super-fast National Broadband Network by the government will only result in a greater uptake of SaaS in coming years.

SaaS isn’t really a new thing – any of the web-based email services – think Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) or Google’s Gmail – are essentially SaaS services.  They do what any email client does, but over the web.  There are other well-known SaaS products on the market, too – CRM software Salesforce is probably the best known.

I have just made the leap to SaaS and have transitioned my email to Google Apps/Gmail and I am rapt – no longer do I have to wait an hour for Outlook (and my virus/spam checker) to download email from the server.  Now, my email is available instantaneously on Gmail with all of the spam automatically filtered out by Google’s fantastic spam technology.

Gmail can be configured to send and receive email from multiple POP accounts, with customisable email signatures for each account.  Gmail also offers some fantastic tools including filters, canned responses, use of labels (instead of folders) and a brilliant search capability that make using this service an absolute dream.   Gmail’s contacts, task list and calendar function have made Outlook obsolete. Perhaps best of all, Google Apps can be used on any web-enabled computer and on my mobile device, which means that I don’t have to lug my laptop wherever I go.

Google Apps also offers Google Docs – an alternative to Microsoft Word and Excel – and a host of other web-based applications (video, chat, collaboration websites) for a measly US$50 per user per year for the premium edition (free for the standard edition).  Compare that to the cost of a Microsoft Office software licence.

In addition to Google Apps, I have started using wiki software – Atlassian Confluence – for my business.  Again, this software is web-based and maintained by Atlassian for a fee of US$490 per year, which I think it pretty cheap.

With a name derived from the Hawaiian ‘wikiwiki’ buses (so named for their speed), the defining characteristic of a wiki is the ability for multiple authors to create and edit documents.  The most well known wiki is Wikipedia, which has a distributed authorship across the world.  The idea is that the community of users is self-regulating to ensure the veracity of the content – despite this, there have been some well-documented instances where Wikipedia content has been ’skewed’ by nefarious Wikipedia contributors, although that content has been ‘righted’ fairly quickly.

Wikis are great for organisations of all sizes too – they can be used as intranets, external websites, project management portals, knowledge management systems, electronic document records management systems (EDRMS),  as a replacement for internal email, or as a replacement for a conventional directory-based file system.

For each of my businesses I have created a collaboration ’space’ within the Confluence wiki which contains pages, blog posts and documents pertaining to the business.  Each of these documents can be read by anybody in the space, edited directly on the server, commented on, downloaded, searched and cross-referenced.  Each space provides a forum where discussions are held and decisions made and recorded.  Over time, these spaces will become rich with historial information and provide us with a valuable knowledge management system.

Slowly I am transitioning all of my files and software to the Google and Atlassian systems.  I can see a day when computers no longer have an organic storage capability (ie. a hard drive) – instead they will simply draw upon the vast storage capabilities on the web (this is called ‘cloud computing’).  Indeed, there are already slimline laptops on the market that do not have a hard drive built in.

The pessimists and the luddites will argue the toss about the security of information, but the reality is that internal systems are often more vulnerable to failure or compromise than those hosted externally by companies like Google and Atlassian.

I encourage netpreneurs to start exploring the very powerful and inexpensive SaaS capabilities that are available to them.  This is the way of the future and early adoption will put your business in a advantageous position.

I was reading a competitor bookstore’s online newsletter the other day and it gave me an idea for a post.  The newsletter went on and on and on.  I scrolled, scrolled, scrolled down through the content and found myself deleting the email before reaching the bottom. 

It’s not that the content was bad – it was actually really good (and it gave me some ideas for our own Boomerang Books Bulletin).  It’s just that I didn’t have the time or the inclination to take it all in. 

There’s a lesson in that for netpreneurs.

People’s attention spans are short these days.  We have so many things impacting on our time - so many distractions, competing priorities, and the ever-increasing demands of everyday life.  We just don’t have the time to read through a lengthy web page or email newsletter.  And when we do have the time, we can’t possibly take in all that information, because our mind is full of so many other things!

So for our human visitors/newsletter subscribers, the advice is to employ the KISS principle - keep it simple, stupid!

There’s also another important consideration when reviewing the length of our web pages - will Google index all of the content if it is too long?  Like most people in modern society, the Google indexing robots are busy little bees.  They will only spend a certain amount of time on your website before moving on to the next site.  If each page of your website contains a thesis, then much of the page content won’t be indexed, which means that your site won’t achieve its traffic potential from the search engines.

With that in mind, here are some tips for good page content:

- Keep each page or newsletter to 200-300 words maximum per page.

- If your content is more than 200-300 words, span it over multiple pages, but offer a ‘print version’ that contains the entire text (it’s painful having to print articles that span over multiple pages)

- Use bullet points, prominent headings, white space, 1.5 line spacing and short paragraphs to break up the content and enable the reader to ’scan’ your content.  It’s proven that most people scan, rather than read.

- Include keyword combinations that you want to rank highly for in Google and other search engines, but make sure that they appear ‘naturally’ within the text (ie. when read, the text should read naturally)

- Put your best content ‘above the fold’ so that every visitor can see it – ie. it is visible once the page has loaded, without the necessity to scroll down to reveal the content.

- Cross-link to other appropriate pages on your website so that your visitors can find other content quickly and easily.  Use contextual links (links within the body text, like this one!) to provide natural pathways throughout your website.

Of course, I am aware of the irony – this article appears on a blog page that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.  A consequence of using Wordpress, although I am sure that it could be configured differently…

• WebEquity – a community site bringing together entrepreneurs with business ideas and anyone willing to work on an equity and/or revenue share basis to make them a reality.
• Templates and examples for planning, analysing, designing and testing a website
• How Twitter can help at work
• Copyscape – a tool for finding plagiarism of your content on the web
• A list of niche social networking sites
• And another list of social networking sites on Wikipedia
• How to write for the web by Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes – written over 10 years ago but still pertinent
• Mofuse – create a mobile version of your website or blog
• Google gears down for tough times - For much of its 10-year history, Google spent money at a pace that was the marvel of Silicon Valley. It hired by the thousands and dished out generous perks, including three free meals a day, free doctors, ski trips and laundry facilities, and subsidized personal trainers.  But now the GFC is taking its toll.
• Tubemogul.com - distribute online video to multiple websites
• How to Friend Mum, Dad and the Boss on Facebook - Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what’s even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see – and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What’s to be done?
• AddThis explanatory video
• 20 great online image editors
• Mypunchbowl – free e-cards for Christmas, Valentines, etc.
• Kiva – Loans that change lives. Loan money to African entrepreneurs.

• 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
• Starting your own Blog? 29 Tips, Tutorials and Resources for New Bloggers
• Twitterholic.com – the Twitter users with the most followers
• Australia’s Top 50 Twitter Influencers
• Where should I place (Google) Ads on my Pages?
• OpenX – open source advertisement serving software
• Email campaign case studies (one good, one bad) from Seth Godin
• Getting ‘fast’ traffic to your Blog

It is important to know which pages the search engines have indexed on your site.  Not only does it allow you to tweak your TITLE tags, page copy and metadata, but it also gives you an indication of how your search engine optimisation efforts are going over time and how good your competitors are at SEO too.

To see how many of your pages are indexed in Google, type the following into Google Search:

site:your URL

A search using site:www.boomerangbooks.com returns 7510 results.  My competitors, Dymocks, have over 149,000 results, so I have some work to do.

As you can see, it’s also a useful tool for checking up on your competitors.

Here are some other operators that you can use in Google to obtain information about your listings:

Some search engines won’t look beyond the home page when indexing your site.  Others will delve a little deeper but still won’t index the entire site.   It can be really frustrating when your best content goes un-spidered.

To give your content  the best chance of being indexed, it’s good practice to make every page in your site accessible within three clicks (preferably two) of the home page.   If you bury your content deeper, then it may not be found.

A great way to do this is to employ a HTML Site Map page that contains links to all pages in your website.  As long as your Site Map is accessible from your website’s home page, then your pages should be discoverable by the search engines.

Another alternative is to publish an XML sitemap (I use XML-Sitemaps.com to build these on the server) of your content and point to the sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools, Windows Live Search Webmaster Centre and Yahoo! Site Explorer.  This will ensure that information about content is ‘pushed’ to the major search engines, giving it a better chance of discovery when the search engine bots and spiders come crawling.  Be sure to update your sitemap regularly, particularly if you run a content site that is frequently updated.

Google is the king of the search engines. So when Google offers you a set of webmaster tools to assist you with your listings in Google, you would be silly not to use them, wouldn’t you?

With Google Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools you can learn how Google ranks websites, how to submit all of your content to Google and how to improve traffic to your site.

Webmaster Central can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. There are a bunch of excellent resources for every webmaster on this page.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can be found at Webmaster Central. These tools can assist you with statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including sitemap submission and reporting.

To get started you will need to specify your website URL and then verify that you are the owner of that site (you will be required to add some code or a file to your website for recognition by Google). From there, you can diagnose how well your site is being indexed by Google, view statistics, learn which sites link to yours, get information about keywords used to find your site, specify sitemaps, and generate a robots.txt indexing file.

Sitemaps are relatively new to the web world. These are XML files that reside on the top level of your domain and which contain a listing of all pages in your site. These files make life easier for Google’s indexing spiders because they tell the spiders where to look and what to index. They are definitely worth setting up and there are a number of tools that can assist you to do so.   Try XML Sitemaps Generator, a server based generator that can be set up to auto-run periodically on your host.

Similarly, the robots.txt file sits at the top level of your website and directs Google’s spiders to indexable content. Google has a robots.txt generator tool here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robotsgen.