Local Business Marketing Consultant
Practical Marketing Strategies for Small Business
Social media is such a versatile aspect of today’s business world, it’s hard not to apply what it has to offer to your personal and business dealings on a daily basis. The internet is the largest marketplace you will ever find in order to promote, advertise and publicize your own business, whether you are starting up a new venture, or you happen to be the head of a well-known corporation.
Here is a thought-provoking article on management techniques. But this is about far more than basketball, or even managing your business:
A friend sent me a copy of a new book about basketball coach Don Meyer
Meyer’s belief was that he could become an external compass and taskmaster to his players. By yelling louder, pushing harder and relentlessly riding his players, his plan was to generate excellence by bullying them. [Read more...]
If you have a service business that travels to your customers, or if you sell goods at a farmer’s market or another location away from “home base,” taking payments has been somewhat limited. To accept credit cards meant an expensive merchant account and portable card reader. That extra expense can cut deep into the profit margin of a small business.
Quickbooks, from Intuit, had introduced a program fairly recently that allows you to use your iPhone to accept credit card payments from your customers. But you have to subscribe to Quickbooks and use their merchant account.
Now, a new company called Square has one-upped Quickbooks with their free app for iPhone and Android. [Read more...]
As you are probably aware, links coming in to your site are quite important to your search engine optimization plan, and to organic traffic (readers finding your site through other web pages). Although you have little control over the way other sites link to yours, you can make the links on your own pages more efficient, simpler for readers to understand, and easier to use:
Have you noticed that it’s harder to find critical contact information these days? If you have a question about an online order, finding a phone number so that you can speak to an actual person is a nightmare at times. Some sites are automatically setting ridiculous default options for you (yay spammy and for-sale email lists!) and opting you in for more headaches.
My latest flipout occurred when my children’s school lunch prepay system wanted $10 to show me my balance, information that is obviously there and easy to display. It’s become very fashionable to totally inconvenience consumers. [Read more...]
If you live or work in the city, you’ve probably been seeing QR codes for awhile (in rural areas like me? not so much…YET).
These are scan-able bar codes, similar to the ones the grocery store uses to ring up your purchases, except you can access them on your smartphone. They can be used as a click-to-call (or click-to-text) function, give the back-story on a product, display a virtual business card, send you to a specific web page, even generate a mobile coupon for your business.
They can be printed on price tags, posters and brochures, business cards, table tents and menus, signs, the applications aren’t unlimited, but you can get pretty creative with them.
[Read more...]
“Seth speaks:”
It might be about the size of the screen and whether or not you’re standing up.
Start at the bottom. For the first five years of the Internet, the most used function was email. Email remains a bedrock of every device and system that’s been built on top of the internet, though sometimes it looks like a text message or a mobile check in. This is the layer for asynchronous person to person connection, over time.
Moving from left to right, we see how the way we use the thing we call the internet has evolved over time. We also see how devices and technology and bandwidth have changed the uses of the net and, interestingly, how a growth in mass has led to a growth in self-motivated behavior.
[Read more...]
Strong personal brands generally don’t just happen by magic; it takes a plan and a commitment to follow through. But because they can really help to increase your business, it’s definitely worth the work.
Here are some ideas to help you build a strong personal brand: [Read more...]
I hear it all the time…Most entrepreneurs are so busy working in their business, they don’t have time to work on it. In other words, they don’t have time to do any more sales, marketing or follow up.
In a day and age where it takes far longer to get a client or make a sale than it used to, this really worries me.
Because if you don’t devote enough time and energy to growing your business, it’s going to stay just like it is right now. If you’re satisfied with that, congratulations! If not, then you need to take action and make changes. [Read more...]
What do you do when you come across a social media site with over 190 million users and 65 million daily posts? Turn it into a website promotion tool, that’s what.
Twitter links are nofollow, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use the social network for website promotion. On the one hand, many SEO experts say that Twitter isn’t a ranking factor. However, Twitter pages directly influence Google’s SERPs and thus may be a major force in search engine visibility.
[Read more...]
According to Lyndi Thompson, a Social Media and Online Marketing Specialist, here are a few things businesses have learned about social media in 2010:
It isn’t free: Social media costs time – a lot of time. If you have someone that is customer focused, understands how to write headlines and reaches out to the right audiences, then you are starting out solid.
Be Creative: Social media isn’t sell media. Be social. Have fun engaging your community, from congratulating them on opening their new business, to commenting on their blog and attending networking events with them.
[Read more...]
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