1. What are your campaign goals?
You want to be specific about the outcome you want to achieve otherwise you can lose focus or not know if your campaign is being effective.

2. What is your budget?
It is easy to spend money. Every time someone clicks on your ad you will be paying. A daily/monthly limit should be in place before you start.

3. Who do you want as your audience?
The keywords used in the campaign will draw different groups of people. Determining who those people are and what they need will set the foundation for the keywords targeted in your campaign.

4. Which keywords are you going to use?
Keywords are the single words and phrases people use to search for anything online. Popular keywords can be extremely competitive and tend to be costly. Targeting 3-4 word phrases that are commonly to describe your goods or service can get you higher exposure to your target audience resulting in a better return on investment.

5. Are you going to use geo-targeting?
You can set how wide a geographic location you are targeting from your location.

6. Which pages are you targeting for your visitors to land on?
By tying your PPC campaign to specific landing pages you will be able to determine which campaigns are working for you and where you might need to make adjustments.

7. How will you measure your success?
“If you don’t know where you are going ,how will you know if you’ve arrived?” really explains why this is important. Setting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will tell you what you need to monitor to determine who well your campaign is working.

8. How are you going to test and improve your campaign over time?
As campaigns age they need to be tweaked. Regularly testing your campaign and improving on its strengths should allow you to see a PPC that gets better over time.

9. How does your PPC campaign relate to and support your other marketing activities?
Best practice is to tie all your marketing together, using your colors, graphics, logos, and tag lines work across lines to convey who you are.

10. How long do you want this campaign to run?
Your budget will in part determine this, but sometimes you only need it to run a short period of time (i.e. if you are promoting an event). Other factors to end a campaign is that you’ve determined that your audience is responding to another medium, a product or service is being discontinued, or it’s time to do something different. Consider your exit strategy, if not at the start definitely as you test your campaign.
Having answers to these questions before you start will save time and energy as you move forward in your PPC campaign.

To add an image to your signature

1. Start by selecting the graphic or logo that you want as part of your signature.
2. Save the graphic/ logo of your preference to your computer. For ease of access this can be done right on your desktop.
3. Open your MS Outlook account.
4. In Outlook (usually at the top) go to Tools and then go to Options. You should see some tabs; click on the Mail Format tab.
5. Under Mail Format go to the Signatures. In your Signature box, select where you want to put the image
6. Click on the picture icon that has a mountain and a sun in a box. A window will pop up with your files.
7. Go to the folder where you saved the graphic / logo and click insert to get the icon. The icon should show up in the signatures.

To Connect the Image in your signature to Facebook or your website:

1. Make sure you are not logged into Facebook before you start. (You will need the URL to be displayed without extra stuff on it)
2. In Outlook select the image. It should show with a black border around it with squared dots inside.
3. Click on the hyperlink icon that is next to the picture icon that has looks like the earth with a chain in front.
4. A window will pop up and this is where you will enter your Facebook link or the link to your website.
5. Make sure the button on the left called Existing File or Web page is selected. No need to look in the documents folder here.
6. After that, click on ok and ok to exit.
7. You can repeat these steps to add other icons with different links as well.

I will add some coding for some of the older IE browsers to work with the HTML5 and CSS3 but I cannot say that it will be 100 percent.
All of the sites that we have designed as of now will work in older browsers.
Thank You
David Howell

Here are a few simple steps to get you started along your way to blogging on your WordPress blog.

BASIC STEPS FOR BLOGGING

Log in: This will take you to the Dashboard of your blog.

Add Post: In the menu column to the far left click on Posts then select “Add Post”. This will open a new template screen.

Title: At the top is a line where you type in the Title. You want to limit the Title to no more than 60 characters if possible, avoiding punctuation if you can. (Search engines read most punctuation in titles as coding so it’s best not to use if you can.)

Body: In the body (the big blank square) you will put what you want to say. In here punctuation is not an issue, just write naturally. Tell your story like you would to a friend. Think about telling your story at two levels. Write the story you want to tell, but then go back and pick out the key thought of a paragraph and make that the subheading above that paragraph. At the end of the piece look back and see if someone could get the main idea of what you were sharing by just reading those subheadings. Ideally this is what you want to shoot for.

Once you’ve gotten this far you could publish it, but you really want to take the time to do a few more things.

EDITING

Once you have completed writing your Post there are a few other things you want to do before you Publish it.

Kitchen Sink: Make sure the Kitchen Sink icon section is open on the tool bar above the body of your Post. This will give you 2 lines of icons/boxes for editing. While you can use all of them I am only going to talk about 2 of the icons/boxes at this time.

Spell Check: Make correction where appropriate. Add words that may not be in the dictionary that you know you will be using again.

Header Settings: Next to “Paragraph” is a down arrow. Clicking on that will open a drop down menu that can be used to turn parts of what you’ve written into Heading and Subheadings. The smaller the number the bigger the size of the lettering. Make sure that whatever you want to enlarge is on a line of its own with space above and below.

SEO

SEO Settings: In boxes below the Post are your SEO Settings. You will want to copy the Title of your Post into the Title Tag. You can modify it if you want, but again for best practices keep it to 60 characters or less without punctuation if possible.

Meta Description: Enter a brief description about the topic of the Post. You can take a main thought or write a teaser of what you want people to know about the Post. Make sure it fits the topic. Try to keep this to 140-160 characters, about the size of a Tweet, as search engines may clip it off if it is longer.

Excerpt: Again you will want to enter a brief description about the Post. You can spin this a little more than the Meta Description and usually this can be a slightly longer piece. This will appear on your blog’s Category page as the teaser content encouraging people to read more.

Keywords/Tags: Dependent on your blog theme you will have either a Keyword line in your SEO Settings or a Tags line either below or to the right. You want to put no more than 10 keywords or phrases about what is in your post. Keywords and tags are not necessarily a single word, but a keyword/tag can be a phrase of 2-4 words. (Example: Art Unlimited, au, web design, designing a website, website design,…)

Categories: Moving up the right side of the screen is Categories. Select the one that you expect people to look under for your post. We will have several for you to select from. Avoid using “Uncategorized”

PREVIEW

It is always a good idea to preview the page before you Publish it. This allows you to see how it would look on the blogsite and discover if you need to make adjustments in the Header sizes, alter any images you may have added, or whatever else you may find. Clicking the “Preview Changes” button under the “Publish” section on the right will open a new window (so you don’t have to worry about how to get back to the page you are working on). Just click the Tab that says “Edit Post” and this will put you on the page you want to be at to finish working on your post.

PUBLISH

Once you have everything in place you are ready to Publish. At the upper right side is a box that says “Publish”. If you are ready to let everyone read this post just click the blue Publish button. You have now posted a blog!

NOT READY TO PUBLISH

If you do not feel that you want the world to read this post right away click the “Save Draft” button. Once you have Saved your post you can move to another page or end your time on the blog. When you want to go back to that post, on the left column click “Posts” and just go to “All Posts” and click on the Post you want to Edit. You can then make the changes you want. Once you are done you can either save your draft again, publish immediately, or set a date and time to publish.

TO PUBLISH AT A LATER DATE

If you have your Post ready to publish, but want to publish this at a later date you have the ability to schedule when it will appear. In the Publish box at the upper right you will see “Publish immediate” Edit. Clicking Edit will open up a line to select the date and time for when you would want this published. Set it to what you’d like, click OK, click Schedule.  Your post will automatically appear on your blogsite at the scheduled date and time.

So there you have it. Everything you need to know to get started blogging. Have fun!

Photo Credit: Stuart Miles

Below are the steps you will need to follow when setting up the POP3 e-mail account on your iPad!  I have attached screen shots as well.

 Step 1

Go to your Settings app > Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Step 2

Select Mail > Other

Step 3

Enter in your name, email, password and a label so you know what account you are creating.

Step 4

Enter in your name email account and password. Make sure you are using account support for the incoming and outgoing settings.

Step 5

If you do not have a SSL you will click “Yes”. If you have an SSL you will not see this step.

Step 6

Click “Save”.

Step 7

Check your email! You will be up and working. If you have already created the account once and it didn’t work remove the account shut down the iPad and restart.

 Anna

Anna Anderson

2/16/2012

SOPA and PIPA

SOPA is the House of Representative’s “Stop Online Piracy Act” bill. PIPA is the Senate’s “Protect IP Act” bill, having a subheading of “Prevent Real Online Threat to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property.” It would appear that the initial intent of SOPA and PROTECT IP was to target overseas websites that host pirated copies of movies, music, TV shows, or stream live sports events. An estimated $200 billion revenue is lost from the people who worked to create the pirated material. The U.S. law would force american credit card providers (Visa, MasterCard, etc) to stop processing transactions for sites that the courts found infringing those copyrights.

This sounds fair right? Everyone should be repaid for the work they do. However what is being called into question regarding these bills is the methodology the government is planning to use to punish violators.

Why the Reaction

The provision that is creating some of the strongest reaction in both the SOPA and PIPA bills would allow the federal courts to order internet service providers (ISPs), the people you get your internet service from, and search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) to block websites that they determine to infringe upon copyrights and trademarks primarily of the american entertainment industry.

What Would Happen

In the case of an ISP it would affect the user by rerouting the requested address to a notice about how the request website was in violation of copyright laws or post a “404 error” stating the website could not be found. In very real terms this means that the government would have the ISP lie about the non-existence of a website.

Regarding search engines, the bill would have them filter out an offending site from the results posted for a general keyword query. For a direct search of the site by name, they too would be required to say the site didn’t exist.

Consequences

While a person could think this doesn’t affect them, there may be unintentional ramifications that need to be considered. While a there seem to be much support from those making their living in the entertainment industry, questions are being raised as to how far reaching these bills could be in other arenas.

A new security protocol, called Secure DNS or DNSSEC, has recently been implemented by many internet service providers to authenticate IP addresses on target sites. These bills would be in direct opposition to this security protocol. Paul Vixie, chairman and chief scientist at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif., has said “Secure DNS can tell you when you’re being lied to, but it can’t tell if those lies are due to a law like PROTECT IP or due to criminal interference. If you know you’re being lied to, but you don’t know whether it’s a lawful lie, then what should you do? It turns out that PROTECT IP would make Secure DNS useless.”

As with any technology, anyone willing to put in the time and effort will find a way around any blockages the government might erect. What that will mean for the rest of us is the potential filtering of the internet in the content we have access to.

It also has the potential for the U.S. to a different set of network addresses for our DNS servers from the rest of the world. It would cause users to “see” a different Internet than someone in another part of the world, not based on personal choices, but based on governmental controls. This is what has happened in China, Iran, and other countries where users were blocked from seeing content the government didn’t like.

Support and Opposition

There is support and opposition on this issue. Many in the entertainment and business industry are backing the current bills. Much of the opposition has been portrayed tech geeks who would be most affected, but their ranks are swelling with credible entities as well. Google, Yahoo, eBay, and others oppose the bills. Domain retailer, GoDaddy, has reversed its support recently. A day of protest in opposition of SOPA is happening Wednesday January 18, 2012 when websites will voluntarily go offline for 24 hours to highlight the potential loss of access users could experience should the bills pass.

Supporters: coldfirepromotions.com/list-of-sopa-supporters

SOPA Blackout Participants: socyberty.com/subcultures/the-sopa-pipa-blackout-list and   http://www.sopastrike.com

This is an awesome article explaining more about the issue: www.securitynewsdaily.com/congress-sopa-protectip-break-internet-1333

Stop American Censorship link: www.americancensorship.org

Stay informed

Mary Ellen

When you use IMAP you are accessing your inbox on the central mail server. IMAP does not actually move messages onto your computer. You can think of an e-mail program using IMAP as a window to your messages on the server. Although the messages appear on your computer while you work with them, they remain on the central mail server.

POP does the opposite. Instead of just showing you what is in your inbox on the mail server, it checks the server for new messages, downloads all the new messages in your inbox onto your computer, iPad or mobile phone, and then deletes them from the server after download or the set number of days that you specify within your settings. This means that every time you use POP to view your new messages, they are no longer on the central mail server. Figure 1 illustrates these concepts.

IMAP makes it easier to view mail from home, work, and other locations

Because IMAP leaves all of your messages on the central mail server, you can view these messages from any location with Internet access. This means the e-mail inbox you view from home will be the same one you see at work.

Since POP downloads new messages to your computer and removes them from the server, you will not be able to see those new messages on another computer when you check your inbox. Those messages exist only on the computer that downloaded them using POP.

However, if you use IMAP and create e-mail folders on the server, these folders are accessible from anywhere you read your e-mail using IMAP. If you use POP and create e-mail folders, they are stored locally, and you cannot access these folders from anywhere except the computer on which you created them.

You have a backup of your e-mail with IMAP

The IMAP central e-mail servers are backed up and thus will not crash. If you use a POP e-mail account, you lose your mail if you have a virus or major computer crash.  We can not help you recover these messages.

Source Article: http://www1.umn.edu/adcs/guides/email/imapvspop.html

Apples, apples, apples everywhere was the dilemma we had after a bountiful harvest! We were blessed to pick apples on a day when there was a windfall (a day after a large wind storm and apples are off the trees on the ground). We stuffed the car and every available space with the wonderful fruit. We were so excited about the great time and experience with friends, plus getting TONS of apples at bargain prices.

The novelty wore off once we unloaded the car! All the refrigerators were full, the coolers and then we stuffed them in a trash can! I began to ponder what to do with all these apples. Pie, applesauce, eating, jams, jellies and more! But, our favorite apple delight is apple butter!

Apple butter is a great way to use large quantities of apples that may not be in perfect condition. It also makes wonderful gifts for Christmas or other events. Plus, it just tastes so yummy!

I use our friend Jackie Clay’s canning book “Growing and Canning Your Own Food” almost every time I can fruit or produce from the garden. I would highly recommend purchasing this book at the following location. www.backwoodshome.com

Apple Butter:

Ingredients:

18 lbs apples
Water
5 cups sugar (or to taste, I usually put in about 4 cups)
4 TSP. Cinnamon (check the date on your cinnamon, if really fresh and powerful you might want to decrease this – depending on your love of cinnamon)
2 TSP. Cloves
¾ TSP. Allspice

1. Wash, core and quarter apples. Place in a large stockpot and pour in enough water to cover. Simmer slowly for 1.5 hours. Put pulp through a strainer or food mill and pour into a large roasting pan. Add sugar and spices, stir well.
2. Put in oven and bake at 300F, stirring occasionally for several hours. (I use an electric roasting pan instead of the oven, heats up the house less on hot days)
3. When thickened sufficiently (you may test on toast at any point!), ladle into hot jars, leaving ½ inch of headspace. Wipe rim of jar clean, place hot previously-simmered lid on jar and screw down ring firmly tight.
4. Process pints or quarts for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath canner. (if you need more info on canning please buy the book by Jackie Clay mentioned above)
5. Remove and let cool. Wipe clean, apply labels and enjoy!

Beth

If you’re like me, you don’t turn down a cookie when it is offered to you. Not only are they tasty, but there are days when eating a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies for breakfast is a whole lot easier than cooking a bowl of oatmeal.

What is a Cookie?

In the computer world there are three types of cookies, little plain text files that allow server programmers to store data on your computer for later access. A persistent or permanent cookie stores data that will not disappear on the next request. Among data that will be held can be login in information, preferences, tracking marketing data, and provide secure authentication systems (although these are not 100% secure).

Dependent upon your computer settings you may see a pop-up asking if you allow these cookies, but by default most browsers accept them. The browser then puts the information into a text file. Every time a given domain is accessed the cookies automatically fill its request for the information. Web sites use cookies because they can save time and make the browsing experience more efficient while allowing the web site (and the search engines) to monitor the web surfer’s habits. Their influence can be noted when comparing the web sites that come up for one person alongside the web sites that come up for someone else, say your mother.

Are Cookies bad for your computer?

Most cookies are not bad, but there are times when they can be an issue. Cookies can be blocked, and some may argue that they should be. When your computer is in a public setting accessible to others, cookies on some sites will allow others to log into some of the sites you visit at the touch of a button. The same is true if more than one person uses your computer. Emptying the cookies the cookies on those will impact your browsing experience, but they will keep you safer in the long run.

Even if you are someone who lets your cookies pile up there are times when you need to get rid of them. Pay attention to your computer speed. Some cookies may contain malware, viruses, or other corrupt files. If you suspect harmful cookies in your system remove them quickly.

To Delete Cookies

Google Chrome

1. Click on “Tools”
2. Click “Options”
3. Click “Under the Hood”
4. Click “Clear Browsing Data”
5. The Dropdown will allow you to “Obliterate the following items” from a variety of time frames – the past hour, the past day, the past week, the past 4 weeks, or from the beginning of time
6. Select “Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data”
7. Select “Clear browsing history”
8. Select “Clear download history”
9. Select “Empty the cache”
10. You can also select the “Clear saved passwords” and “Clear saved Autofill form data” (again this would be recommended if you share a computer or work in a public environment)
11. Click on the “Clear browsing data” button
12. Click on the Close button when done

Internet Explorer 9        

1. Open the Internet Explorer window
2. Click on the “Tools” button
3. Under the ”General” tab click “Delete Cookies”
4. Click “OK”

Mozilla Firefox

1. Click on “Tools”
2. Click on “Options”
3. Click “Privacy”
4. Under “Tracking” make sure “Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked” is checked
5. Under “History” select “Never remember history” on the dropdown
6. Under “Location Bar” select either “Bookmarks” or “Nothing”
7. Click “OK”

So that’s how to take care of deleting cookies currently from the big three browsers. If you have questions about cleaning out from other browsers, please ask.

In the meantime, I think I need to find one of those chocolate chip cookies to go with my coffee.

Mary Ellen

Photo credit: Cookie Pile from Free Digital Photos.net

Resource: About Cookies.org – www.aboutcookies.org