Stacy Duval

Website Design and Digital Marketing

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How to create a tracking URL in Hubspot

When you want to track an advertising link leading to your web content, you need to create a tracking URL.

1. Choose or create a Campaign. I find I usually want to create a new campaign. This will allow you to see exactly how many hits and leads you received from that particular ad. Campaigns are under the CONTENT tab and are easy to create.

2. Tracking URLs are under the REPORTS tab. Choose REPORTS HOME. And then over on the right hand side of the screen you will see the following menu:
Tracking URL Hubspot
Choose TRACKING URL BUILDER.

3. Will now be on a screen where you will see all your previously created Tracking URLs. There is a blue button on the top right hand side of the screen. Press “Create a new Tracking URL”.

4. Now you will see a box where you can create a new URL. In the first box “Enter a URL” put the URL the ad is linking to on your site.

5. In the second box “Campaign Name” choose the campaign you chose or created in Step #1. If you skipped that step go back!

6. In the third box “Select Source” choose what type of advertising campaign this will be tracking. This doesn’t matter too much, it is what category on the reports page HubSpot will organize your tracking code data. Then Press the GENERATE button.

7. Then Hubspot will create your tracking code and you will see this window below:
Hubspot Tracking URL created screen

8. Hubspot creates a tracking URL and shortens the URL for you. Choose the shortened URL and give it to your advertiser as the link to your site!

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10 Accounting Tips for Freelancers

UPDATE!!!! Only three weeks later and I have an update to #3 below. I have tried Mint and have found it is not recommended for business accounting, but if you are interesting in have a better business managing you can start using a payroll system check this payroll guide for small businesses. It does not do invoices. I am so excited about starting up my Quickbooks app again and continuing our long relationship! Mint is made by Intuit, which is the company that also makes Quickbooks, Quicken and Turbotax. This is from the Mint help section:

Mint is a personal finance tool, we don’t (and likely won’t) offer this feature. You may want to check out Quickbooks products.

Last night I heard some enlightening words spoken by Ian Munc, CPA at the WIMP meetup on how to use technology to manage the money side of my business. This is NOT a recapitulation of what Ian said but what I heard. (Just so you know.)

#1 I’m ENTITLED TO AN EIN NUMBER FROM THE GOVERNMENT! WOOHOO!
I thought you had to be a LLC, B Company, S Corporation or Ltd or whatever to have an EIN. For you freelancers that don’t know, an EIN is an Employer’s Identification Number. This is a number that is used by business entities on their tax forms. Now that I am entitled to one, I can use it instead of spreading my SSN all over the place on those W-9s you fill out for Fiverr , Odesk, Paypal, Square, Thumbtack, etc., etc. Also when I have to issue 1099s to contractors I don’t have to compromise my security by passing out my SSN, I can use my EIN.

#2 I shouldn’t mingle business with pleasure. If you have a personal Paypal account, you need to make a separate business Paypal account. This makes downloading your Paypal transactions into your bookkeeping software easier.

#3 I have to break up with Quickbooks. I can’t even tell you how long we have been together. Before you were Quickbooks you were Quicken. Ian says I don’t need you any more. I’m simpler than you. A new application called Mint is free, on the cloud, does the posting for me, from my other online accounts, makes professional invoices and will do just fine for a sole proprietor freelancer.

#4 I no longer need a balance sheet. Not that I spent much time looking at my balance sheet. I was posting a lot of ins and outs into my capital account and that’s about it. I didn’t even realize our relationship was over as soon as it started. Ian says it is okay just to pay attention to your Income and Expense accounts.

#5 I immediately need some human lunch dates. As much as I love spending lunch over my computer or phone, dining with inanimate objects is not tax-deductible. There must be WIMPs or other humans I can talk business with. I will be shamelessly asking you our to lunch and asking for my own bill and last but not least, paying with my business card.

#6 I can buy $200,000 worth of equipment a year, if it is not more than my Income account, and deduct it completely and honestly from said income on my taxes without having to fill out those damn depreciation forms for a zillion years.

#7 My home office no longer has to be confined to the closet in the basement (the only place I could find that wasn’t being used for some other purpose in our house). I can do my work from the living room, the kitchen or even the pool and there is a simple multiplier — like for automobile expense — I can multiply times the square footage I deem my home office to be.

#8 I don’t have to hire a bookkeeper. Matter of fact, because the cloud has made bookkeeping passé, Ian doesn’t even offer it as a service. My bank statements, and my Paypal account can be all downloaded into my cloud bookkeeping app and I can upload my money to my creditors with the bill paying function.

#9 I need to break up with Eudora and Earthlink because Gmail Inbox is so sexy and knows you so well it categorizes your mail for you. Damn! Is there a way I can send my mail going back to 1999 to my new Gmail Inbox account?

#10 In the afternoon, when I’m needing a break it will be easy to read all my subscription emails because I can use the app Unroll to further organize my subscription emails. In addition to this, many software development and software testing companies have also joined hands with me, to make the process easier and hassle-free.

#11 I’ve got a #11! If you happen to have a side business, like I do, perhaps in Holistic Healing, you can lump your income and expenses with your freelancing account. All your business income and expense gets summed up and put on the same line on your tax return so no need to tell the IRS which type of business did what. This was invaluable advice to me, because now I can deduct my flower essence bottles and I was glad Tina asked the question, because I didn’t want to ask my $700 an hour accountant that very same question! (There is a good reason for the name FREE-Lancing, unfortunately some of my clients think so too.)

I want to repeat the warning I stated in the beginning. In no way is this Ian Munc’s advice or my advice for running your business. Especially since I have linked this post to the IRS! Remember to pay your taxes every time and on time!

Links:
WIMP
EIN Number
Mint
Unroll
Inbox by Gmail

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WIMPgives

WIMPgives is a charity hackathon where a team of people get together to build websites for non-profits. This year it was held on November 1 and seven teams built seven websites for non-profits in the Bay Area. I joined the group Web and Interactive Media Professionals (WIMP) last year just after the first WIMPgives. It was one of the reasons I joined and I waited patiently as the year went by to have a chance to be part of this amazing event.

First, I had to apply to be a volunteer about a month before the event. Pretty scary but my application was accepted. Then I just waited to see what team I was on and what non-profit we would be building a site for. Two weeks before the event, a prep day was held. We met our team members and our non-profit. Angela Wooton from my non-profit, Foodies Project, was there to meet with our team and tell us her needs.

Team Drake consisted of
Angela Wooton – Foodies Project
Gabor Por – Developer and Project Leader
Danielle Foster – Designer
Stacy Duval – Content Strategist
David Hauser – Marketer
Pamela Nelson – Apprentice

After the prep meeting, our project leader Gabor set up Google Docs and Dropbox for us to start to collaborate. I worked on a content strategy document and Angela put tons of photos into the Dropbox.

On the day, we arrived early and got our instructions. I was feeling nervous and our team got a little cubicle for all six of us to sit in. At first we needed to figure out how to arrange ourselves. We were a little jealous of the people who had private offices and tables to work on. Eventually we came up with a good placement with Gabor and I in the middle, Angela and Danielle on the right next to Gabor working on the design and Pam and David on the left next to me working on the content.

And we worked! For nine hours we created the website from scratch. Gabor had set up the development site the night before, loaded with the framework and some plugins. He needed the design from Angela and Danielle so he could start programming the site structure. He was so brave and coded a custom site in PHP for the build. In the meantime, I set up the slider, while Pam started loaded content from the old site into the new site.

Pam had never worked with WordPress before but with only a few directions her fingers started flying and she was creating new pages and copying and pasting content from the old site to the new site.

Danielle was so fast. She cranked design assets into the Dropbox so fast from Adobe Illustrator. We kept asking her for more and she would do whatever we wanted in a flash.

David was amazing on SEO and went through all the content on every page, creating optimized text for every page.

The time seemed to go by fast in the morning. The work was intense and my adrenaline was high. By the afternoon though, when we did not think we would have all the kinks out by the presentation, time seemed to slow down and at 6:03, Gabor and I finished the last troubleshooting for the site.

Going into the presentation we were all sure our site was the best! But we didn’t realize that there were six copies of our team doing a fantastic job too. I loved all the sites after the presentation and was glad to be among such an amazing group of people.

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SF WordCamp 2014 – Design with Personas

The first workshop I attended was with Davide Casali, called Design with Personas, a Lean Approach. This was a high level UX/UI design topic and I felt as if I was in a university graphic design class.

Davide began by explaining the tendency for there to be a disconnect between user and designer. The machinery separates us from our users and creates a shadow hiding the users. This happens naturally because we are focused too much on the product itself.

The second disconnect is called “Elastic Users”. The typical user of a site becomes diluted or can be quite different from the actual user because each designer has a different view of who the user is. The more people on the design team, the more ideas get added to who the user is.

Personas are profiles of typical users of your website. They were invented by Alan Cooper who wrote the book “About Face”. They are a profiles of typical users, how they behave, how they think and how they communicate, and most importantly, why. A persona is like fictional character development in fiction, when you are finished you should be able to predict exactly how that user would think, speak or do something because the description is so complete.

Once the personas are fleshed-out then the software can be built based on behavior. Building a persona should not be considered a deliverable, but data synthesis. The first step is your discovery process, your initial research and then the personas are developed. Once the personas are done then development can begin. The persona is synonymous with the data.

Personas can be used in different ways. They can be used to design, to reference data, to prioritize and plan and to do ticket triage. For instance, if you know 65% of your users are this type of persona you can place those people in the beginning of your support queue.

To complicate is easy, to simply is hard. ~ Bruno Minardi

Contact Stacy

707-849-2702

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