Emergency rations (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Find out if those Facebook promoted posts really work, how to be an Adwords master, and some new rules for Adwords.

10 Lessons on Effective Facebook Marketing – How to prove the value of your ads, measure performance, and set effective goals (Avinash Kaushik, who is referred to in the article, writes the Occam’s Razor blog and is a web analytics expert).

Do Promoted Posts on Facebook Work? – A case study to try to find out.

Adwords Cracks Down on Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Ads – That means those ads that change depending on what people search for. This can (I have found) sometimes lead to very odd results, such as offering me the chance to buy a person I was looking for.

Google Adwords How To – A roundup of videos (collected by Denis Labelle), showing you how to run an Adwords campaign.

How Facebook LIkes Really Work – Turns out, it’s not just “likes”!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the best Mac productivity widgets.  I thought it only fair to give Android fans a similar post.  Here are five top apps.

Swiftkey – a virtual keyboard that can practically let you touch type on your phone.  The software predicts what you’re typing and learns as you use it.

File Explorer – misplaced a file?  this app will search through your phone, dropbox, Google Drive, and more to help you find documents, photos, and videos

Flipboard – Make your own personalized magazine, with just the stories you’re interested in (and the tablet version is gorgeous).  It’s great for inspiration for blog posts or sharing on social networks (and it’s free).

Evernote – if  you’re like me, you scribble ideas and notes on lots of little scraps of paper (and end up with a mess).  Evernote fixes that.  Everything in one place, neatly organized.  The standard version is free.

Titanium Backup – backup your data, your settings,  your memory card info, everything. Backup, it’s a good thing!

Voice Search – search without typing at all.  You can send text messages, navigate through menus, and find addresses (great for working while you drive).

Todo – syncs your to do list with Dropbox (for safe storage in the cloud). Files are in txt format so they’re easy to move and open with any editor.

Dropbox  – access your files, documents, and images wherever you are; or use it as backup.

 ES File Explorer -can’t find a file? This app will search your phone, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon S3 and find the documents, photos, and videos you’re looking for.

Voice Recorder – easily record message and send them (no typing!)

NASA Rocket Launched January 11 (Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video)

Get more conversions, increase your blog subscriptions, and improve the quality of your blog traffic. It’s the quality of the visitors that count, not the quantity!

Blogs Designed for Conversion – Sending people to your blog or landing page? Here’s how the experts get more conversions from their visitors.

Answers to questions about search, conversions, and more from SEO Moz Rand Fishkin – Check out the question from Adrian Pike about how requiring a credit card (or not) affects sales after a free trial.

Graphics and Web Conversions – Do images improve conversion? Or reduce it? And where should you put them?

Targeting Website Traffic – The more relevant your welcome and offer, the better (a cheat sheet infographic with targeting tips).

The Best Color for Conversions – What do you think it is?  Green? Red?  Orange?

Watch the video for the answer.

If you’re not a designer, trying to find the right fonts or colors can be pretty confusing.  Sometimes, it’s even confusing trying to understand what designers are saying.  Here are four web sites, and a book, that can help.

Gold… crossed & cropped (Photo credit: Brett Jordan)

iconfinder.com – a search engine just for icons; just type in the one you want (arrow, cat, map, etc).
myfonts.com/WhatTheFont – give them an image of the font and they’ll help you identify it
google.com/webfonts – free and constantly updated font source
kuler.adobe.com – get color scheme ideas and pull out colors from pictures

Also, a book (!) which is extremely useful…The Non-Designer’s Design Book (3rd Edition)Now in color, this book makes complicated design principles easy to understand (even if you’ve never designed anything in your life). Get the paper version (not the ebook, the formatting gets farkled in the e-version, which sort of spoils the whole point!).*

*Also, the law requires I tell you that if you buy a copy, I can toast you with half a beer.

Victorinox SwissTool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

feedmyinbox.com – Sends your RSS feeds to you in a single email newsletter

privnote.com – These notes will self-destruct in five seconds (great for content you want to keep private)

scribblemaps – Make your own Google maps

copy paste character – Bookmark this handy site to copy and paste useful characters that aren’t on your keyboard (look ma, no coding).

OCR net – Turns scanned images into Word documents, plain text or RTF formats. And, it’s free too.