February is almost here and if you may not have heard, the Excel Hero Academy back for a new season. Yes, you heard correctly, the Excel Hero Academy is preparing for a new season.
You do not know what the academy is? What is the Excel Here Academy? It is an Excel course offered by Daniel Ferry over at ExcelHero.Com. It is one of the easiest ways to learn Microsoft Excel. Don’t just take my word for it, check yourself. Take a few moments to read the reviews, the Excel programmers and Excel consultants that have taken the course swear by it. The best thing since sliced bread. And the course is not just for those of us that are Excel consultants or Excel programmers; it is for people such as financial analysts, accountants, sales reps, etc. It is designed for anyone that uses Microsoft Excel.

The cost for the Excel Hero Academy is around $500. Is it worth that much? Well, from what I have been able to learn, yes, it is. Look, if you are an Excel consultant that would like to be a little stronger in Excel, you should strongly consider taking this course. If you want to be an Excel power user, Excel guru, etc., take this course. You will be happy that you did.

Excel Hero Academy

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

I have a question for this blog post. What would you pay to take a course to become an Advanced Excel VBA Programmer? Let’s say that you are a low level Excel user in an accounting department and you and your boss have decided to enroll you in a course that will allow you to become proficient with Excel based VBA, up to the advanced level. If such a course was offered, say online, where you could learn all of the VBA code to take you to the advanced Excel consultant level, including the understanding as to why the code is used the way that it is, what would you be willing pay for it? Say if the course was tailored to accounting and finance departmental needs.

While the course cannot give you the years of experience needed to perform at the expert level, it could provide a shortcut taking you from a beginner to advanced Excel consultant in a matter of months. In this situation the ‘why’ you do what you do would take place of the years of experience you would be missing. Knowing when to use specific lines of code, say a certain type of loop for example, could reduce the learning curve, taking it from theory to practice relatively quickly.

So what would you pay for a course that does this?

Expert Excel Consultants – Excel Consultant

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Do you have a Mac? If so, do you use Excel 2011?

I do not know if you work with Microsoft’s Excel 2011 for the Mac in your business practice, but at Excel and Access, LLC we do. In the past 6 or so months I have so many new clients that come to us for Excel consulting help for their Microsoft Excel 2011 Mac needs that it has caught my eye. In 2010 I might have see an Excel 2008 file now and then, with basic help needs, but now a month hardly goes by where we do not get numerous new Excel consulting service projects that require Microsoft Excel Mac programming experience. And believe it or not, you can actually program Excel for the Mac without having a Mac machine. And it works.

Do you own an iMac or MacBook Pro? Do you do Excel consulting for the Mac? Do you runs Parallels? In the past year have you considered buying a Mac? Personally, I own a couple, and clearly I prefer Macs over my Dell machines. And yes I do run Parallels on all of them, currently with Microsoft Office 2010 Professional and Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate. I also run Excel 2008 and Excel 2011 on each of them. What can I say, I went to the ‘white side’ and I totally love my Macs.

Expert Excel Consultants – Excel 2011

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

As I stated in yesterday’s blog post it has been quite a while since I have done any posts. Luckily I have been busy with new projects, Ralph Lauren, LinkedIn.Com, etc., the Christmas holiday, New Years, etc. But I did make time to have made some new changes to my new ExpertExcelConsultants.Com web site that we have been working on. This was done mostly last month. Most of it being updates on Graphical images, much of it being done to the expert-excel-consultant page of my website. In case you are unfamiliar with Excel and Access, LLC, we provide Expert Excel Consultant services to Businesses, across the globe, from the UK, to Au, and the USA. From New York, to California, to London, Manchester, and Australia and New Zealand. Since it has been so much time since I worked on the website I decided that I wanted to focus on that webpage even more, hence, the graphical changes to the website.

If you have the time, please take a look, and provide any feedback that you may have.

Expert Excel Consultants

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

I have made some new changes to the ExcelAndAccess.Co.Uk web site.  Mostly to the Excel consultant page of the site.  AS you know, we provide expert level Excel Consultant and Access Programmer services.  So I wanted to highlight that even more, and hence, the changes to the site.

If you have the time, please take a look, and provide any feedback that you may have.

Excel Consultant

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

I am going to write a series on The Directory of Excel Experts.

Part 1.

If you have been to several of the major LinkedIn.com Excel &/or Access related groups you probably have come across a post on the Directory of Excel Experts.  The Directory of Excel Experts is just that, a directory that list Excel experts.  It is a web based directory to be more specific.  Web based directories list links to web sites.  That is pretty much all they do.  Often they are nothing more than web farms, without any useful resources and just endless Google Ads.

While the link is the core purpose of this site, this site is much more than that.   Yes, this site does have the SEO purpose in that the Excel expert gets a link to his site, and Google gives the SEO boost.  This directory is no different.  Having a link from a directory is good for the expert’s site, and having the link come from a directory that is in a related niche is even better.  That makes this site that much more attractive.  So when it is fully populated it will list a lot of experts, with a link to each of their websites.  Google will give each of them a SEO boost.  That is the SEO part of the site.

Now this site does much more than that.  In reality the link is only 10% of what this site is about.  This site is really a site about resources, a site that promotes the Excel experts, their work, their own sites, and it allows the experts to share what they do, if they choose to do so, they can keep that private if they decide to do so, and they can just register for the SEO link.

The site is also searchable.  This is an important aspect of the site. So if someone is looking for an Excel expert they can come to this site and find one?  Need an Excel expert in Florida, this site will have all of them listed.  Need an Excel expert in London that speaks at seminars, this site will have all of them listed.  Need an expert for a webinar, find all of them here.  This site makes it all so easy.

Do you write books on Excel, or do you want to buy one?  Every Excel expert can list their books that they have written, right here, on the directory for the site visitors to review.  Think about that.  If someone wants to find a good book on Excel, they can look thru every Excel book available on this one site.  No sales pressure, because the directory does not sale the books, Amazon or such sites will do that does that.  We just list them and their summary, etc.  Resources J

The site will list all of the major forums, blogs, etc.  Think of it as a hub for existing expert sites and not as competition for them.  The directory does not have forums, why would it, Mr Excel, VBAExpress, Experts-Exchange, they already have the best ones.  It will not compete with them rather it will feed traffic to them.  The directory is a resource for the experts and the site visitors.

Who wins, the Excel expert and the site visitor.  The user can learn more about Excel, and the Excel expert can better serve the Excel community, while getting an SEO boost.

The site opens for registration soon.  Take a look. It will be a great resource.  If you are an Excel expert we want you listed.

Good questions if you ask me.  Any feedback?  We would love to have some interaction here.

<a href=http://excelandaccess.co>Excel and Access</a>

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Part 18.

I was looking thru Google ads tonight and I saw something worth writing about. I typed ’excel consultants’ into Google and saw two ads for two different sites with the exact same text, except for the site address. Everything else was exactly the same. They did not show up on the screen at the same time, but the showed up a few minutes apart, for the same search term, excel consultant. I looked at the sites, then discovered they were owed by the same company. So that is why the ads were the same. So not so exciting.

Interesting at all?

Good questions if you ask me. Any feedback? We would love to have some interaction here.

Excel Consultant

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Part 15.

Tonight I ran numerous ads to see if I could find something interesting to blog about and it took me over 15 minutes to do so, and I had to try really hard. Finally I came up with a topic, singular versus plural ad topics. Sounds boring, I know, but it totally changes the Google search results. I tried it for the following key phrases, Excel expert versus Excel experts, Excel consult versus Excel consultants, Excel programmer versus Excel programmers, and a few others, and the results I got were not the same. I got different results running different ads. Same thing happens with the organic Google listings. Try it out.
Interesting at all?

Good questions if you ask me. Any feedback? We would love to have some interaction here.
Excel and Access Consultants

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Part 14.

Back to Google. When I ran my search today I did it for ‘Excel consultants’ and I came across a free WordPress site. It is rather interesting. They are paying for ads for the term ‘Excel Consultant’, but the site does not look like an Excel consultant site at all, unless you take the time to really read it, but then it is still not visual. Does an Excel site need to be visual? A question, not a comment. Anyhow, it has the word ‘Excel’ on it numerous times, on all of the pages, but it just looks like a site that is all about growing oranges and not about Excel consultant services. No really. And I am not passing judgment. I need to be careful here. They have pictures of someone planting orange trees. Several pictures of this. And the index is the only page on the site with pictures on it.

It is also interesting to note that the site has both a contact page and a quote page, that is nice that they took the time to do both, one with an attachment option too, but it does not have a phone number listed or e-mail address listed. They do not list relevant contact information on the about us page either. They do say that if you contact them they will get back to you in 24 hours. I wonder what they are paying for each of those clicks and how much they pay per day pay. And if you wait 24-hours, are they still in the need of assistance?
Interesting at all?

Good questions if you ask me. Any feedback? We would love to have some interaction here.
Excel and Access Consultants

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Part 12.

For today’s post I pick up where I left off yesterday. Earlier today I was speaking with a developer in the UK about yesterday’s post and the topic of the cost of a Google AdWords click came up. Over the past year there has been a constant influx of new Excel consultants and Excel programmers setting up their own websites. So many in the past few months with WordPress sites. The question is if they are all using the same basic keywords, say Excel consultant, Excel programmer, Access developer, Excel help, etc., and they all want to be on page one of the Google search results, how much money will they be willing to pay for that users click? Now keep in mind that some of those clicks will be by those unethical competitors that keep doing multiple clicks of their competitor’s ads, yes, people do that, Google actually has an entire department that investigates these clicks and that takes action against them. Other bad clicks will be repeat clicks from legitimate leads that click more than once for valid reasons as they bounce between several websites, competitors try to mimic this when they want to click your ads, Google watches for this too, and others will be clicks from searchers that were looking for something else, other than what you are offering. So many of the clicks will be a waste. So the question is how much are you willing to pay for someone to click on the phrase expert Excel Consultants? Take it a step further, how much will you pay when you have just a single page for a website? Are you running your ads to block others ads, or to build ad history, or to test the market, or to get business? Either way, how much are you willing to pay? $500 a day? $300 a day, $150 a day, $75 a day, $20 a day? $10 a day?

Supply and demand.

Interesting at all?

Good questions if you ask me. Any feedback? We would love to have some interaction here.

Excel and Access Consultants

Please e-mail me at Christopher@ExcelAndAccess.Com with any questions, comments, or feedback.