A lot of you couldn't join in for the webinar I did on Sunday. I guess it wasn't a very convenient day for most people and some didn't have enough data on their phones to connect live.

Well, today I am sharing with you all the webinar materials: the PowerPoint presentation slides (download here) and the live recording of the entire webinar (watch here).

I started with the theory of digital marketing, how it is different from traditional marketing. Then I talked about the required components to an effective digital marketing and personal branding. After that I proceeded to giving us a live demo.

I started the live demo with LinkedIn. I explained using my profile page how you should optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract eyeballs and especially that of recruiters and business clients. I gave testimonies of how LinkedIn got me my second job that launched my Excel consulting career and how it is constantly getting me a stream of clients (now that I run my own business).

I then talked on how to get a one month free LinkedIn premium account and a hack to get the most value out of it. I went on to explain how to set up an advert on LinkedIn. How to target it to people in a particular location, industry, age bracket, job function and company size. I did a practical demonstration of this.

We moved on to Facebook. I explained how to set up Facebook adverts for dirt cheap. And also target it to as narrow or broad an audience you want. I gave practical comparisons of the conversion rates I get from LinkedIn vs Facebook ads.

I showed the Twitter account I have that has over 31,500 followers. I explained how it came to be and gave some very valuable practical tips you shouldn't ignore. 

I also answered questions you will benefit from. In all, it was a very educating session and you now have the opportunity to access everything: the presentation slides and the webinar video recording. 

Don't miss out of our next webinar! Register to be notified always: Webinar Directory Sign Up.

Without intending to I have joined the hackintosh community, a community of people who install Apple's Mac OS on their non-Apple PC. The image above is a screenshot of my Samsung laptop and as you can see, I have Apple's OS X Mavericks running on a VMWare and already upgrading it to OS X Yosemite.

So how did I get into the community?

It all started when I registered for an online course on building iOS apps. As you know, my strategic aim is to move into the enterprise business apps space and replicate the solutions I build for clients in form of an app they can use on their smartphones and tablets.

I originally thought I would need to buy a Macbook as it's general knowledge that Apple won't let you deploy to its app store from a  Windows or Linux PC. Fortunately, as I progressed through the course I found out that I could have the Mac OS without buying a Macbook.

And that's how I joined the hackintosh community.

But beyond learning to build iOS apps on the Mac OS, I would be trying out the newly released Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac. I would be building Excel programs that would be Mac compatible and also training people on using Office for Mac.

Expect to see more Mac specific posts from me.

Making money online is very easy and straightforward only after you've done it. But before then it is very frustrating.

image: learntoearntuts.com

Today, I'll be sharing with you ways I have used to make money online. I'm hoping you will find one or two ideas you can use in your own quest to make money online.

Blogging
I have a blog and it makes me money. Last month it made me $106.89 from adverts. And it has gotten me several other business clients and opportunities that I can't easily fix an amount to.

My advice is that go for passion over profit. Because of two main reasons: number 1, the profit never comes early enough; and number 2, only passion will keep you going happy and proud. You wouldn't want a blog that you're not proud of, one that is just there to make money and talk about things you have no interest in. That would be a self-inflicted punishment.

When you blog, you open yourself up to opportunities. You connect with people without having to spend expensively. The people you connect with will remember you more than those you spend money to meet at a networking event. That in itself is a big value that has a $$ tag. And if you don't quit you will also make some money from adverts (google adsense is most recommended).

Selling Things Online
I sell iTunes card and other gift cards online. Without any stress and in as little as 5 mins I can complete a full transaction and make a gain of a few dollars. 

Then I sell our Excel training online. This has pulled in a lot of money for my business.

Affiliate Marketing
I am a Konga Affiliate marketer. Here's my affiliate link and subaffiliate sign up link. I have 39 subaffiliates. I am yet to make more than the N500 sign-up bonus but I know that it's just a matter of time before some money begin trickling in. Also I was on the Jumia affiliate program, made some money but it was reversed so I pulled out.

I am also an Amazon Affiliate marketer. Just that it didn't make me any money so I stopped my promotional activities.

Freelance 
I joined a couple of freelance sites: upwork.com, fiverr.com, freelancer.com and guru.com. I have made close to a $1000 from them despite not being so active. And it has gotten some offline contacts and business opportunities.

And those are the ways I make money online. 

And currently I am working on selling my books on Amazon and this will be another source of online income.

Today, this evening at 6:00pm, I will be showing you how to build your personal and corporate brand online. And also how to make the most of the digital marketing world.

image: pofitec.com

I will show you how I grew a twitter following of over 31,000 followers on one of my twitter accounts, an account I wanted to shut down in 2012 because I was frustrated. 

I will show you how I built a very impressive LinkedIn profile. How it got me the job that turned me into the Excel guru and consultant I now am. And how I have kept getting opportunities via LinkedIn. I will also show you how I place adverts on LinkedIn and set up my company page.

I will show you how to run adverts on Facebook for dirt cheap. The strategies to help max out the ROI.

I will show you how I have built my business marketing on digital marketing and have it work for me. I will show you the benefits of digital marketing over traditional marketing.

Below are the first three slides in the PPT I will share with you after the webinar. So don't forget to sign up (by replying this post or registering here). The time is 6:00pm today and all you need to join is to go to www.join.me/urbizedge at exactly that time.

This month is a great one for Microsoft. They are launching several products this month.

image: ibtimes.co.uk

July 9: Microsoft launched the Office 2016 for Mac. Now Mac users can enjoy the goodness they missed since the Office 2011 for Mac. If you are more interested in the details and how to get it, head here: Official Release of Office 2016 for Mac.

July 20: Visual Studio 2015 official release date. This will be of more relevance to programmers who use Visual Studio. Microsoft is making great strides and getting more innovative. You can expect a lot more than what was available in the Visual Studio 2013. Head over here for more on this: Visual Studio 2015 release date

image: jiffie.blogspot.com

July 24: Power BI graduates from the preview version to a fully functional generally available version. On July 24 we will be able to download an updated version of the Power BI designer and access a lot more functionality. You can read more on it here: Power BI becomes generally available.

image: blogs.microsoft.com

July 29: Windows 10 launch. The highly anticipated Windows 10 will become fully available on July 29. You can check out the amazing new features it has and even reserve a slot for a free upgrade: Windows 10 

image: microsoft.com

And those are the big events Microsoft has lined up for this month.

There will be times you need to extract a portion of a cell’s entry. A practical case was a template I built for a telecoms company to determine the least cost partner to use for each international call destination. So I had to use a formula to pick out the country codes and check which provider is the cheapest to use to each destination. 

I have prepared a sample data for a simple illustration. It is the matriculation number of the university I attended. It is a clever combination of department name, year of admission and candidate number.



The first three characters are the department acronym. The two digits sandwiched between two forward slashes are the year of admission and the last four characters are the candidate number.

We are going to use LEFT to extract the department name, RIGHT to extract the candidate number and MID to extract the admission year.





It is a very easy to understand formula: =LEFT(A5,3). You simply specify the cell you want to extract from and specify the number of characters you want to extract starting from the leftmost character.

In this example, it’s three characters we want to extract starting from the left (beginning of the cell entry).

Now let’s proceed to extracting the candidate number. This time we want to extract starting from the right, four characters. So we will use RIGHT.



=RIGHT(A5,4)

Also very easy to understand.

Finally, let’s extract the admission year. It requires the MID formula. It’s a little not easy to grasp like the LEFT and RIGHT. It requires that you specify the starting point for the extraction. The concept is very easy to understand, the part that trips a lot of people up is how the starting point is determined. You have to count from the first character (from the left) to the first character you want to extract. 

In this example, we will count till the first character of the year. It is the character number 5. Then you’ll proceed to specify the number of characters you want to extract (2 in our case). 





=MID(A5,5,2)

A5 is the cell we are extracting from. 

5 is the starting point.

2 is the number of characters we want to extract.

Don't forget to register for our next special Excel Training here: In-depth Excel and Business Data Analysis Training

Never stop learning.

image: nsrealtors.ca

I'm sure you already know this and even practice it. You are always open to learn something new from every situation and every person. You even take delight in unpleasant situations that give you some excellent learning. But that is not the type of learning I would be focusing on today. That type is too common and not strategic enough to make breakthrough changes.

I want you to have a strategy to your learning. Pick out what you want to learn and go after them. Preferable to have this structured over years and not just our usual 1st quarter of the year achievement list or yearly achievement list. If while you were a teenager you planned for the next 4, 5 years of your life, learning-wise, by picking a university course, then why should you now be obsessed with short-term plans. 

Let your learning be deeper and more strategic than what you did as a teenager. Have result oriented learning goal. Learn to acquire skills that will produce tangible values at a superb quality level than just for show off.

And if I may suggest -- stay away from any popularity contest. I currently get an email from one guy who has been nominated alongside Basket Mouth, Chude Jideonwo, Chimamanda Adichie and such like for an award. He is constantly bombarding me (and I'm sure all his network) with mails to vote for him. And I'm wondering how an award that is given based on our many random people you could coerce to vote for you is a true reflection of your merit/value. Imagine if that was how Nobel prizes were given. Then Mugabe would even be a Nobel Prize winner; he'll simply make it a law for everyone in Zimbabwe to vote for him.

Popularity contests detract you from genuine value creation and structured learning. And there are the more subtle ones too. The ones that give awards for social entrepreneurship. If your line of business is originally not in the social entrepreneurship space then don't for the sake of an award steer it into that space. Social entrepreneurship is more of a quantity over quality field. How many people you can reach matters way more than depth of quality of what you are doing. If you want to start a purely for profit business then go straight for it. Learn all you can to get the resources you need. Don't bother about those popularity awards. 

You need to have a very thought out learning strategy. Figure out where you want to be and what you'd need to be there. Block out the outside noise/trend. Work, even if slowly, towards where your ultimate aim lies and learn all you can that will help you reach there faster and easier.

In all, never stop learning.

Excel lets you name a cell or a selection of cells. It’s very useful when you are building models in Excel as it makes the model formulas easy to write and troubleshoot. 

They are two ways to create a named range and I will start with the very quick and easy way.
Just select the cell or group of cells you want to name (set up as a named range). Go to the name box and type in the name, replacing the cell address in the name box.





We’ve successfully named all the Imo state revenue values as Imo. As benefit number 1, we can use it in a SUM formula (and any other formula) instead of highlighting the entire range.



Another advantage will become obvious as when I discuss Scenario Manager in a later post. It makes your work much more readable. =Revenue/Exchange_Rate makes more sense than =A5/Q4.

So what is the second way of creating a named range?
It is, in fact, the standard way. It’s also the only way that allows you to edit an already created named range.

Go to Formulas menu and click on the Name Manager.



You can create new named range, edit already created ones and delete a named range.

I have been slowly learning a new data analysis tool -- R statistical and computing language. 

It reminds me of my Excel learning days. It's not about what you understand but what you can creatively do. The most part of learning a new tool is being able to think natively in it.

If you give me a problem to solve, within 5 mins I would be sure if Excel can do it and, if yes, all the ways I can get it done in Excel. I am able to think creatively in Excel. All I think of is the input and the output. If Excel can handle the input and can display the output, then Excel (in almost all cases) can solve the problem. What functions or code or add-in to use is not a factor in my deciding whether Excel can solve a problem or not. If need be I will create new custom functions to get the solution.

Unfortunately, Excel can't handle some statistical and computing tasks well. Which are R's particular domain. So I have been slowly learning R since 2013. Slowly because I have been fixing all my problems with Excel instead of trying out R for practical jobs.

But now I am committing to adding R as one of my native tools. I will begin to use it more and run live projects through it. I like the unmatched charting tools it has and the ease of doing many complex analysis. I might even try out building a web app with it via the amazing Shiny (a package that lets one integrate with a web page and put up results of one's computation online, dynamically too).

So meet R and expect to see more posts on it from me.

Goal seek is one of those powerful but seldom used tools in Excel.

It allows you to set-up a small model and tell Excel to optimize it for you based on one variable input and one set output. It’s the perfect introduction to a model and linear programming in Excel.

Let’s see a simple and common use case. Below is a loan calculation table. Say I have found a huge business opportunity in large scale cocoa farming and I want to borrow N100 million from the bank. The table below is the conditions the bank gave me: a payment period of 10 years and annual interest rate of 24%.



Excel has a formula for calculating the annual payment amount.





So I go and check my business financial projection, and find out that I can only afford to make N20 million annual payment. What rate will I negotiate with the bank? 

This is where Goal Seek comes in. We simply tell it to find out what interest rate will evaluate to N20 million annual payment.

To access Goal Seek, go to Data menu and What-If-Analysis.





I set payment amount cell to N20 million and tell Goal Seek to vary the interest rate.

Once I click on OK, it does a series of iteration and gives me the result.



I should ask for 15% annual interest rate.

It's now your turn to find that interesting use of Goal Seek.