Everyone has a website. Every business has a website. Many dogs have websites too.

How is your website doing? When was the last time you took its temperature? Updated its content? Hugged it for making you so much money?

For many people, especially small business owners, having a website is a chore. They have no time for it. Making changes is too complicated and time consuming. And if they get hacked - forget it! They wish they never had to deal with it.

It is possible that a lot of business owners do not feel they understand their website. They also rarely know how much money their website is making them, how much new business is a direct result of their online presence.

If you want to simplify your life, listen up. Use these tools once a month for reporting and as needed for updating. Track your success and fix problems quickly. Give your website some love and care. Then, watch it give back in ROI like you never seen before.

Last week I was consulting on search engine marketing efforts. After a brief audit of paid and organic marketing, it became clear that my client is using pay per click (PPC) to drive traffic to their home page. They thought that by buying clicks to home page they will improve their search engine ranking. My next step was to go back to basics and explain the difference between PPC and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

A couple of hour later, the SEM picture was clear. We had SEM strategy, goals, and targets for PPC and SEO separately. The client understood what the final result will be and expectations from each marketing channel.

When choosing between PPC and SEO, it is important to understand the differences. Each is used for different purpose, has different expectations, implementation, and tracking. I do recommend to implement both. However, if you have to choose between the two, consider the following.

There are 24 hours in a day. You have about 8 hours of discretionary time spent on family, driving, shopping, cooking, movies, friends, social media, and reading. Do you have time to read all the blogs you want to read and all the news you want to follow? I do. I used to spend about 4-5 hours a day reading. I condensed it to 2 hours a day and get the same result. I created a more efficient process of reading news. And I am going to share it with you today.

Here are the tools I use: Google Reader, iPhone, iPad, Flipboard app.

I love to read. If I could, I would read every interesting blog post ever published. I realize it is impossible, but I still attempt to do it. Frequently I found myself drowning in articles. It was hard to prioritize what to read until I discovered Flipboard.

Flipboard for iPad - Your Timesaver

Flipboard is an iPad app that aggregates you Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Reader feeds. Flipboard's home page is a place where you bookmark your content. You can not only add your main feed but Twitter lists and Facebook groups. That way you can use a shortcut to get to the content you want.

Flipboard for iPad is a more visual way to read the articles your friends shared with you. The content is easy to share (with attribution to the original poster) and post between your social accounts. But most importantly, it is an incredible time-saver. I like Flipboard much more than competition (Zite, StumbleUpon for iPad, Iinstapaper, etc.) because of the very good integration with social accounts.

There are several steps to any decision making. When picking a tool, you are faced with many choices. How can you do your research effectively and efficiently?

There are many articles, reviews, and general advice on what tools to use for your website, SEM, social campaigns, ROI tracking, etc. Some tools are more popular, some less. Opinions vary on usability, capability and usefulness of those tools. It is hard to keep up with emerging new applications and web apps, enhancements to the old tools, and tools that are no longer supported. To make it even more difficult, there are Firefox and Chrome add-ons, Excel plugins, Adobe Air desktop apps, and website based services. How do you pick the right tool for you?

In this post I will share with you my scientific process of picking tools. What makes it scientific is that I use Excel to make my decision. Tricky? Not at all. Here is how it works.